Part 2: Journey to Johannesburg

As I go from province to province, I have become very familiar with being guided to a school step by step. “Take the exit, turn right and then call me.” And after the next phone call, “Go straight, turn at the t-junction, and when you see a primary school on your right, call me.” Then a third set of instructions.  A couple of weeks ago, in Katlehong, outside of Johannesburg, I missed a turn and the principal had to come get me and guide me to the school.

Some schools simply exist in an area and for others, that space has meaning. I had only read a little about Katlehong, but this school’s founding, its history and its present are grounded in the space.

Phumlani Secondary School was started in 1993. “It was the last school formed in the area by the previous government,” Principal Shumi Shongowe told me. “There was a fight, a war between the IFP and the ANC, the soldiers that were deployed by the previous government... People were killing each other. There was blood all over. And there was no time even to bury those that were dead.”

Then he paused, looked up and calmly said, “And it is then that this school was started.”

It was a reminder to me of the painful history of this country and the trauma and chaos out of which so much, including this school, has been born.

Many people who work in schools say that uniforms help with discipline and focus, but I rarely hear that the blues and yellows and greens and maroons have any meaning. Surrounded by brutal violence in 1993, Shongowe consciously chose the school colors. Red for the blood that was spilled. White for the hope that remained. “To say,” he told me, “after some time, all this shall be over and life shall go back to normal.”

In 1994, that was a new normal, one might say.

The school has grown from 200 students and a 5 percent pass rate in 1993 to 1,783 students and a 94 percent pass rate in 2012.

These 1,783 learners also find meaning in the uniform. “I call it a uniform of success,” one learner told me. “People who are in jail, not that I’m criticizing, but people who are in jail, they are wearing a uniform of regret. So this is a uniform of success.” The nuance and generosity he extended to prisoners with the use of the word regret struck me. Not violence, evil or wrong, but regret.

Just after our interview with the principal, I casually peered into the school’s log book and amazed that it reaches back to the very establishment of the school and reads like a historical journal:

Sept 6, 1993: There was a national stay away called by the African National Congress and the alliances. The entire work force and the schooling community responded positively to the stay away and therefore teaching and learning did not take place.

April 22, 1994: Due to excitement of the first democratic election in the Republic of South Africa and the usage of the school building by the IEC for elections, education in our school came to a standstill.

May 10 1994: The inauguration of the state president. The whole world came to South Africa as Mr. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was inaugurated as the first Black president of the Republic of South Africa.

My mandate here is to identify keys to success. I often find that while those keys are unique, they really should be commonplace.  One principal only hires teachers who studied that subject in college or university. That seems fairly basic, right? How can a history teacher teach biology? How can an Afrikaans teacher switch to technology, as I saw happen at one school? This too often happens as teachers are moved from subject to subject to fill gaps, despite a lack of training.

In another example, at Tetelo Secondary School in Soweto, Principal Linda Molefe and his staff end the year with a two-day meeting where they create a comprehensive plan for the following year. Acknowledging that plans constantly shift and change once the year begins, he said, “We can start right away because we know where we’re going.”

I always ask about parent involvement because I know it’s a critical factor but often very difficult to achieve. Both principals emphasized that getting the parents to show up wasn’t enough. It was their obligation to teach parents how to be involved, to be clear about what is expected of them.

One principal has created an easy way for parents or grandparents, regardless of their education, to check their children’s progress. It involves simple numeric indicators. “Some of these grannies, they have never been at school… it is your responsibility to try and school them. To say what role are you expecting them to play. And these grannies with the issue of indicators, they also become excited because they can now get involved and give support to their granddaughters and grandsons.”

I have a new word for moments in these journeys that surprise me. I now call them “Acapello moments.” At Phumlani Secondary, a group of boys approached me and asked if I would film their singing group. I was blown over when I heard the harmony that came from the mouths of these boys, the noises they created through snapping and percussive beats.  It was like nothing I had heard before at a school in South Africa. The Soul Singers (as you may have guessed) are an acapello group.

The accapello moment at Tetelo Secondary came at the very end of the day, during mandatory study time for grade 12 learners. Because of the heat, many bring desks and chairs outside. We found one group of about 10 learners sitting under a tree, intently studying physics, debating and teaching one another. They traded off being the teacher, chalk in hand, using the side of a Cell C container to write on.  (If you aren’t in South Africa, this looks like a shipping container and you often find them in townships. They usually have public phones inside. I am not sure why this one was on school grounds.)

The irony was not lost on me that these kids were choosing to learn under a tree in a country where for years children like them had to learned under trees. I shouldn’t speak of it in the past sense, since this still happens in some rural schools.

When I flew back to Cape Town on Friday morning, there was an article in the newspaper about an Education Charter that was recently put forward by the South African Human Rights Commission. The charter offers rules and recommendations to the government on giving quality education to all children. It addresses issues like crowded classrooms, suggesting that pupil teacher ratios not exceed 1 to 40 for grades 1 to 12. It has a series of ambitious deadlines to meet aims for everything from reduced class size to electricity and running water for all schools, to making sure schools have other basic and essential services needed to teach and learn properly.

The Charter is filled with incredible goals to improve education across the country.  I hate to be pessimistic, but I just don’t understand how they are going to fix so much so quickly. At Phumlani, the 1738 students are based in an old primary school building. The principal says he is basically running two schools. At Tetelo, I saw students mopping out their container classrooms in the morning because it had rained the night before and the classrooms leak. In the midst of the cleaning and mopping, some were polishing shoes and straightening ties.

So how will the government build enough classrooms and buildings so these students aren’t packed 65 in a class and don’t have rain dripping on their books? To have actual libraries and labs rather than a lab on a cart that is pushed from class to class.

I remain somewhat doubtful, but hopeful and I’ll wait and see. In the meantime, maybe the government should bring some of these principals to other schools to share their best practices. “There is no recipe for success,” Principal Molefe from Soweto told me. But I think sharing ingredients would be a good start.

Part 1: Journey to Mafikeng

I disappeared in 2012, but I’ve decided to write again in 2013. This dispatch is the first in a series of reflections about education in South Africa. Over the next several months I will be visiting 14 schools in seven provinces across the country. The mission of the Schools That Work project is to create a series of videos that serve disadvantaged communities and are having academic success – or but are having academic success, depending on how you see it. When compared to other schools in South Africa that also serve poor children, these schools are excelling despite. Despite the hunger and poverty of the learners which negatively impacts their experiences in the classroom, despite struggles with parental involvement, despite lack of classrooms and toilets, despite sometimes unresponsive provincial and national governments, and sometimes, despite necessary resources. I was hired to do this project by Jonathan Jansen, Rector at the University of the Free State.

Last year, in Limpopo, pupils were without textbooks for the first half of the year because the government had not delivered the books. And just before the beginning of Matric (school leaving) exams this year, the Minister issued an open letter apologizing to grade 12 students. In it she said, “I know 2012 has not been an easy year for you. I also understand that you may feel I, Minister of Basic Education, have let you down. I apologise unreservedly for all you have been through as a learner.”

It is likely that for many students it would have been a difficult year even if their schools had proper infrastructure and enough resources. They didn’t need school to make life harder. You know things are really bad when the government feels it has to apologize to learners for failing them, for not giving them the education they deserve. And this apology just devastates me. Kids deserve so much more. Governments, education departments, politicians should all be advocating on behalf of students. They should be the good guys. Unfortunately, they often aren’t.

So this week, I traveled to Mafikeng. Mafikeng is a small town in Northwest province. It is about a 20-minute drive from the Botswana border. The first language of most people is Setswana and there is also a significant Indian population. At one school a boy stopped me and asked, “Why don’t you film the Indian kids, we’re here,” and pointed to a group of his friends. I told him we were filming everyone. It was interesting to think about how he sees his place at the school – a school where most students are Black, the principal and one of the deputies are Indian and the staff is very racially diverse. I still haven’t found out why there is such a large Indian population in Mafikeng.

Every time I visit a school, see a classroom, watch teachers and principals, I think about my own experiences. I think we frame how we see all schools through the lens of our own experience as students, as educators, as parents. My cameraman Felix and his soon to be wife are expecting a baby in a few weeks and all this time in the classroom led to conversations about where and how we would want to educate our children. This week after watching a trigonometry class, Felix, and I talked about our failed attempts at solving sine and cosine. I remember the teacher; I remember the class and some of you reading this might have been in it with me. Felix grew up in a small town outside Stuttgart, Germany and no doubt our school experiences were very different. But regardless of the country, trigonometry seems to prevail.

Each school has it’s own feel to it. Some feel warm, some chaotic, some very structured or disciplined, others a combination. The first school we went to has incredible academic success but felt very chaotic – more outside of the classroom than in. I was only aware when we arrived that the school did not fit into the mold of the project, as most of the students there are middle class. I don’t think I have ever been to a school here that is mostly middle class students. Where the challenges include things like Facebook and cell phones. I have been to very poor township schools and formerly all White more resourced schools, but never something like this.  South Africa is full of extremes and one doesn’t often see the middle.

The second school was a warm place. The buildings are physically spread out because it used to be a teacher training college before it became a high school in the 1980’s. The physical plant reminded us of a missionary school with long white buildings of classrooms and nice trees and flowers. But the school no longer has laboratories or a library because they were turned into classrooms for it’s 1441 students. There are 18 toilets for 800 girls and 16 toilets for 600 boys. When I asked the principal what his priority was, he chose classrooms over toilets.

When filming, I try to represent reasons why a school is so successful and often that comes through excellent teaching. In one English class, 9^th graders were reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds,

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove…

Many made it their own with tone of voice, body, energy, and humor. The teacher affirmed them, allowed the class the space to laugh and clap noisily, and before each student began grounded them by saying, “The stage is yours.” Some of excellent teaching is personality and after filming we talked about how his classroom felt different. Positive and full of joy, and that wasn’t just due to a love of Shakespeare.

At an economics class – if you’ll believe me – we found students almost equally excited. Who knew learning about land, labor, capital, and natural resources, labor could be fun? The teacher brought two students up to the front, had one take off his tie, roll up his sleeves and hold a bottle of water  -- the laborer. The other one remained staid in his uniform, tie and all. He was the boss. Above the chalkboard were photos of Martin Luther King, Obama, Mandela, Malcolm X, Walter Sisulu and W.E.B. DuBois and quotes from Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. What was notable for me were the diverse notable people who he brought into the space. (It would have, of course, been nice to see a woman too!)

But just because a school has high Matric pass rates, it doesn’t mean that every teacher is going to show such passion and energy. I also saw teachers on the other end of the spectrum – one struggling to control students (as I once did), one who seemed barely interested and others who stood at the front of the class and talked at students rather than with them. I saw young teachers and older teachers, and I know that no matter who they were, they all try and they all care. But I keep thinking about how we define good teaching and what makes good teachers.

One moment in particular sticks in my mind. It was an 8^th grade English class.  As the teacher called student’s names for presentations, she didn’t make an effort to pronounce them or seem to care which face belonged to which name. As she sifted through her cards, she even named the same kids twice. Many students were not ready which I know is frustrating as a teacher. But in the environment in the room was uninspired and felt negative. I wouldn’t have felt supported or wanted to try very hard in that classroom. Why is this worth telling? Well the teacher was white, her students Black and in a place like South Africa where questions of race are still so prominent, these moments are all the more significant for me.

I’ll close on a picture that will make you smile. Picture a group of girls on the edge of a field in funny hats twirling batons and flags. Behind them, on the big field, is someone mowing a lawn. In front them, a team of boys, in bright colored shirts, run in circles around the field. Amidst it all, if you look carefully, you’d find Felix kneeling and lying on the grass in an effort to capture it all.

I love those moments. 

Dispatch: 100 Schools

“Can everyone who cried raise your hand?” That was the question last Wednesday morning that started my post-screening discussion at Rustenburg Girls Junior School.

The next questions were all rooted in one -- Why? Why did this violence happen? Why did people use violence instead of just talking to each other? Why didn’t they attack White South Africans who are also really foreigners here? Why was the government so slow to react? Why did the police use violence? How did foreign policemen feel? How did Black policemen feel against Black people? And more and more from these 6^th and 7^th graders. Two girls suggested that the xenophobia attacks could be seen as part of South Africa’s growth as a democracy and now that they are over, the country and people will learn from them so the violence won’t happen again. Sadly, in some places, it already has.

Some of their questions were easy, some were hard, and how to explain unanswerable complexities that we adults have not figured out, well that is a constant challenge.

These girls were 150 of thousands of students across South Africa who watched Where Do I Stand? last week in honor of World Refugee Day, June 20th. Shikaya (the NGO I partnered with on this film) and I partnered with UNHCR to create the 100 Schools Doing 1 Thing on 1 Day campaign, asking schools to show solidarity with refugees by screening the film. Monday turned into the whole week and 100 schools became 115, running the gamut from rural and urban, private and public, and wealthy and poor.

One of the first replies I got to my email about the campaign was from a principal in Soweto who had seen Where Do I Stand? at a film festival last year. I don’t often share feedback directly, but this email articulated the impact of documentary in a way that is hard to describe. He wrote:

Dear Molly,

My school (Moletsane High) will be part of 100 schools. Since I saw your film it has inspired me to be involved. Last month, police in White City in Soweto were closing all shops owned by foreigners without reasons. They also arrested a lot of Pakistanis and Somalians. I approached Moroka police station commander. He informed me that foreigners who own shops were increasing the crime by not banking their money. The criminals were targeting their shops because they bank in their shops. The other reason was that they are having a lot of fake money. After hours of discussions he agreed to give them their shops’ keys because we were able to demonstrate that crime and civil matters are different. We managed to assist the poor Pakistani to operate their business. Once more thank you very much for the film that changes lives.

Best regards,

Elliot Mashinini

I heard from Elliot again last Friday. He screened the film to almost 200 students on Monday and invited local Pakistani residents to join. The outcome, he said, is that learners want to start an NGO to make sure there is a good crèche for foreign young children in Soweto and they also want to conduct workshops to educate people about foreigners in their community.

Another principal used the screening to set off a week of activities in the school supporting refugees. He noted that, “Every single pupil was engrossed, and what made it even more powerful was the fact that they could recognize the sights and sounds of their own city and see that it is taking place on their doorstep.”

Another, from KwaZulu Natal commented, “It’s been a very sobering and eye-opening experience for many of [my students]. Most of our girls do live in this sheltered bubble and it’s very important that they are aware of what other youths their age experience in this country.”

My colleagues at Shikaya went to several schools last week. I made it to four, starting with two screenings on Monday at a high school and a middle school – about 500 students.

At most screenings there is a moment that throws me. Sometimes it is the sadness of a question or the pain or hatred of a comment; sometimes it’s the raw confusion or the incredible insight of a young person. Sometimes, it is simply that I just don’t know what to say … or how to say it.

On Monday, one boy asked how I thought Mandela, Sisulu and Biko would feel about Black South Africans using unemployment, poverty and the history of apartheid as an excuse for violence. Strategy #1 for a Challenging Question – throw it back on the student. He said it didn’t make sense to him, he thought they would be disappointed. He also seemed a bit angry with the perpetrators, at Black South Africans, that they would think this history and their painful past could excuse the violence.

I agreed, I said to him, I think that they would be deeply saddened. But it made me think of a comment made by a girl in the film who says she doesn’t understand how people who were victims could do something like this to others and the idea at the heart of his question -- whether just because people are victims, they won’t turn into perpetrators. It often comes up in these conversations after my film, with adults and young people. I find that most young people are flummoxed by this – it is so hard to understand how these people who suffered so terribly at the hand of apartheid could turn on others. How could people who were victims of apartheid treat others with such hatred and violence? I hesitate always to answer this question because it is so complex, because I don’t want to sound as if I am defending the attackers if I say that being a victim doesn’t mean you won’t be a perpetrator, and it is still hard for me to get my head around.

I imagine that it’s something that has been studied a lot – victims turning into perpetrators, on an individual or a broader scale. Just because people were once victims does that then imply they will always remember that moment and never turn on others? While many want to believe that, in fact, I think it is often the opposite. In the back of my mind, I thought of Israel; how the violence in Gaza and the West Bank is being perpetrated by some people whose families were victims in the Holocaust. That is just one example. I am not sitting here, writing, attempting to take a stand on what is happening in the Middle East, it’s just something that occurred to me – something that I didn’t speak, in part because these were high school students, in part because this was a private Jewish school, in part because I didn’t want to open Pandora’s box.

On Thursday, my conversation with 11^th grade girls took a surprising turn when one student explained that she knows that xenophobia is wrong, but she isn’t sure because her grandmother tells her to stay away from foreigners, that they are bad people, and she knows that her aunt is in jail because of a foreigner. “Xenophobia is wrong but foreigners have really hurt my family,” she added. Across the aisle, a classmate, a friend spoke up, “I am from Zimbabwe,” she said, and then talked about what it was like when she first came to South Africa. Her journey took her via Britain, different from her compatriots who traveled across the mighty Limpopo River, but nonetheless easy for adjusting.

I pointed out that the girl probably had many friends and classmates at school who are foreign. “It’s different when you know people personally as opposed to them just being others,” noted another student. The first girl continued, “If I was in a room full of them and I was the only South African, I would be scared because they are different, they have different manners and different ways of doing things and … (here I should have taken notes.) I stopped her there and repeated what she said. I know that she has studied apartheid and the Holocaust in school so I pointed out that what she just said has been repeated countless times to justify discrimination and prejudice elsewhere, including South Africa and Nazi Germany. But I didn’t want to shut her up or alienate her so I tread carefully. Her teacher also spoke, which was brilliant because often in these situations teachers stay quiet. He spoke in a more frank way than I was comfortable doing and for that, I thank him.

It’s a difficult line -- I want her to recognize the extremes of what she is saying, to learn that her grandmother is wrong, to honor and live by what she first said -- xenophobia is wrong. But I grew up in a house where I didn’t have to challenge my parents on political and social issues. And I imagine it is quite hard to do. I remember reading a book about Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of Henrik Verwoerd, widely regarded as the architect of apartheid, and his work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I told her about him as one example of someone going against their family and what they were raised to believe. But I acknowledged in the same breath that going against your family is not easy to do.

So I mainly challenged her to question -- to question her grandmother and her family, to look outside, to figure out what she alone believes and to stand up for that.

And she’ll get there – I hope.