Do teachers care?

Listening to SAfm this morning, I heard part of a phone-in discussion between the presenter and a representative of a company that has done research on the number of public schools as opposed to private schools in South Africa. The discussion focused, among other things, on the levels of responsibility and accountability encountered on the part of teachers at these respective kinds of institution.

At one point the representative of the research company remarked that a difference seemed to exist between the levels of responsibility between teachers at public schools, as opposed to those at private schools, with the latter showing greater responsibility than their counterparts at public schools. The reason for this — so the person from the company that had conducted the research opined — was because teachers at private schools, who were paid less than public school teachers, were more concerned about losing their jobs than public school teachers, and hence, acted more responsibly by turning up regularly for work and performing their teaching duties more adequately.

I have no disagreement with that argument in the terms used — I believe she was right about the difference that “job insecurity” makes on the part of private school teachers. The presenter sagaciously remarked that “this raises serious questions” about our public schools. To be sure it does, but such questions cannot be addressed adequately unless the societal context within which teachers of all stripes work in South Africa is taken into consideration.

For one thing, what the perceived difference between the two groups of teachers implies, is that potential loss of salary makes a huge difference in the way you discharge your duties as a teacher, and not really a sense of duty or dedication to your “job”. Correct. I would suggest that this is related to the difference between experiencing it as “just a job”, or as what used to be (and in some circles still is) known as a “vocation”.

But the real question lurking behind these things is this: in what kind of society is it the case that private school teachers display greater responsibility? And is “responsibility” even the right word here? My answer would be: in a society that has come to valorise money above all else, and no longer the kinds of values that go hand in hand with choosing a profession such as teaching because of a deep desire to impart knowledge and other humanistic values to the youth of a nation. Ergo: it is not really a sense of “responsibility” (in the encompassing sense of being concerned about the well-being of the pupils in their charge) that such private school teachers show, it is merely a fear that they would be summarily dismissed unless they turn up for work regularly.

But let me substantiate from a different angle. One may well ask why public school teachers do not hesitate to stay away from their duties for various reasons, the current one being that many of them are on strike because of a salary dispute. Regardless of my belief (which I should make clear at the outset), that teachers ought to be paid decent salaries, and that they therefore appear to have legitimate grounds for “industrial action”, I also believe that there is plenty of evidence — confirmed in this morning’s discussion programme — that a large percentage of the country’s public schools are “dysfunctional” even under “normal” circumstances.

This lamentable condition is overdetermined, in other words, more than one “cause” contributes to it. One cause is, I believe, that, given the valorisation of money-wealth in South Africa today, public school teachers are generally more interested in salary parity with other sectors than in the specificity of what their jobs require, which used to be subsumed under the term “vocation”. Instead of a vocation, many teachers in the public sector display a sense of entitlement, for which they can, in at least one respect, not be blamed, namely that every avenue of social and economic activity around them transmits the same message, “loud and clear”, that money is all that matters. (Many people engage in corrupt activities, regardless of the risk that they will be found out, for the sake of getting their hands on all that lucre.) They therefore feel understandably entitled to a substantial piece of the cake — government leaders have set the example for them, after all.

There is a second cause, related to the first one, but more fundamental, which bears on the lack of a true sense of community in South Africa (something more enduring than the media-manufactured sense of national “solidarity” during the World Cup). To understand what I mean by this, I have to digress somewhat.

When my children were young, and we were living in the United States (in New Haven, Connecticut), they attended a public school charmingly called Worthington Hooker (no, not a reference to what they were taught there; it was named after a person by that name). It is a wonderful little school where they were given a varied and interesting education, and parents did not pay any school fees — unlike public schools in South Africa, as far as I know, and not merely Model C schools — despite which they were even given a meal at the school every day. Noticeably, the pupils were taught in a manner that cultivated their independence, together with a sense of community with the other pupils and staff in the school.

Concerning this independence, I recall dropping a warm jacket at school for my elder son one day, only to be told by the teacher (a statuesque black woman who was working at her desk while the pupils were gathered in small groups, talking softly while working together on a project of some kind) that she had sent him to the school library to do some research for her. Arriving at the library I found him at a table, several reference works in front of him, busily writing down whatever he was looking for in the books. He was 10 years old at the time.

Regarding the sense of community, I recall the way in which the teachers and all the pupils, joined by some parents, formed a long line on Halloween evening, all bedecked in grisly costumes, and walked through the neighbourhood singing appropriate songs, to the great delight of onlookers and those who lived there. Further, that their sense of community stretched as far as giving a boy from South Africa (my elder son) the honour of reading the United Nations Charter aloud before all the pupils and teachers on International Students’ Day, to show him that he, together with other pupils from different countries, was welcome there.

This is what I mean by a sense of community — cultivating a sense of something shared, something worth being loyal to, regardless of what you are paid. In her book, The Shock Doctrine, activist-journalist Naomi Klein reconstructs the dire social situation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Among other things, she refers to the schooling situation before and after the devastating hurricane.

Before Katrina, there had been 123 public schools run by the school board; after Katrina only four remained — the rest of the public school system had been auctioned off and replaced by privately run charter schools (before the traumatised city population could recover sufficiently to take preventative action), of which there had only been seven before the storm, but grew to more than 30 afterwards.

Moreover, the approximately 4 700 public school teachers were all fired after the storm, although some younger ones were re-hired by the charter schools, but at lower salaries than they received before. As Klein points out, charter schools are hugely controversial in the US, because many people claim that, because they are privately run for profit, their advent has reversed many of the costly civil rights (including the right to equal education) won by the public at an earlier stage, especially for poorer people.

All indications are that the public school system worked well in New Orleans before the blow delivered by Hurricane Katrina, and that pupils were given a good education, regardless of where you went to school. Needless to say, the sense of community cultivated by this, has evaporated with the arrival of charter schools, both because of the exclusion of most experienced teachers, and given the unexpected financial difficulties faced by poor parents.

Expat South African friends of mine, who lived in Brooklyn, New York (at the time we lived in New Haven) often extolled the virtues of the multiracial school where they sent their children, given the combined effort by teachers and parents, to make of the school — situated in a poor area of Brooklyn — an educational resource of which they and their children could be proud. Being a public school, they did not pay any school fees either.

The difference in their case, as in mine (in New Haven), was that the teachers and parents were in agreement about the goals of the education they wanted for their children, and the teachers were dedicated to these, to the point of accepting their responsibility for it. This is quite ironic, given that the US is known as the paradise of capitalism, but my experience there has taught me that they have something else, too, that we don’t have here (yet), and that is a strong sense of community, especially in a localised form.

This is why (judging by the radio discussion mentioned earlier) private schools in this country can use money in the form of salaries as a means to get their teachers to work — and from the testimony of a graduate student of mine who works at one of these schools, private school managers know how to squeeze blood from a stone where teachers are concerned.

From experience, I know of several Model C schools in the city where I live, where a spirit of community, comparable to what I experienced in the US, does exist. But more broadly speaking, until a sense of a common ethos, and a commonly shared set of educational values were to emerge in this country (at least minimally, and I don’t mean the shallow emulation of “information-society” goals), the understandable entitlement-to-more-money attitude among especially public school teachers, as indeed among employees in other (largely public) sectors of society, will persist, effectively blocking the development of a strong sense of accountability.