Hon House Chairperson, due to the absence of interpreting services, I will use the language of the oppressor for today's speech. The problem with education and with violence in education is not in the first place the environment and the poverty in the environment but the degree to which the community is involved in the school, the degree to which the school is an extension of the parental house and of the community itself.
If we look at the history of schooling in general worldwide, one could say that the very beginning of schooling is exactly the same as education; it is just simply where children were taught by their parents what good conduct is and how to behave. It was face-based
and it was training in some kind of job related work at the same time.
With industrialisation, it became necessary to get children from the streets as their parents were engaged in salaried paid work all day and could not look after children. That's when children were taken to schools and they were brought under some kind of control. That led to adult school experience which was lightened up but was never fundamentally reimagined even to the present day.
Nevertheless, it reduced the violence in communities because children were at school, they were productively engaged and schools were, in fact, an extension of the house and community.
In the dispensation after 1994, the Constitution of South Africa acquired religious authority in which no religious or other sorts could be viable if it would be against the Constitution and that's why corporal punishment was abolished in schools and now even at homes.
The idea by the Chief Justice in trying to convince us is that children should be disciplined by convincing them rather than coercing them, which is a nice idea if it would work like that. I
just wonder how many parents and grandparents have the experience that there does not come a day that you need to discipline in a harsher way than just to convince the child.
If I look back at my own upbringing, we were taught the doctrine of the original sin, which means that the human condition is that one is out of oneself prone to sin but still that the image of God is living in all of us and that the art of education is ... [Interjections.] ... to work against the sin to which humans are prone to and to recreate the image of God. That is something which is done by communities but when the state gets omnipotence in education and makes all the important decisions and the decisions are taken away from the homes, houses, parents and the community, then it devolves into something that we all too well know today.
I want to finish by saying; I was not quite in a middle class high school in Pretoria. It was before 1994. It was a white school. May I say that if the teacher didn't beat up the bullies, the bullies would beat up the rest of us.