On a Tuesday afternoon while I was driving, listening to the news, I could not believe the news reader when she announced that the Pretoria High Court has granted an urgent application by an 18-year-old matric pupil to reverse basic education minister Angie Motshega’s decision not to publish matric results on newspaper platforms.
This came as a surprise while I was just writing about the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and the earlier announcement by the Department of Education on dissemination of the matric results this year.
Let me admit, as an old schooller, I was not against the reasoning of the education system but I was sceptical about the sudden concern from this department.
I feel that even from our time, matric results should have been confidential. We were too exposed to noisy people. But I must say, we were very strong not as weak, if that is a right word, as today’s children. During our time, there were never suicides because one failed.
But with the POPIA or the ruling or the education system, I had questions, like since when does this department care for the privacy of children? How real was the concern? What was the system trying to hide from the public? And many other questions. But I had this thing that, they were fooling us, acting as if they were protecting the children but instead they were protecting themselves.
The reality is, education will forever be something that we all long for, for ourselves and children. But with the pandemic and the confused government that we have, soon it will have no value. As soon as the government lost the grip on the pandemic, it started to introduce a lot of various laws and policies regarding schools, such as platoon or rotational systems at schools.
Immediately that was an uphill battle for schools. Kids were out of control. Most attended while others had all sorts of apologies for not attending.
Ask any teacher, he/she will tell you the mountain they had to climb to get our children at school. The introduction of the rotational system has come back to haunt the education system. Secretly or behind the doors, the system went on to tell teachers that no child should fail, it is not allowed even for the one sitting in the comfort of his home, who never even wrote the exams.
Teachers have to account for a dropout whose parents are careless. They have to abandon those at school and run around looking for the lost ones. Kanti, what are we parents doing for the education of our children? Why must it be teachers that are after our children? Why is the current government and its education system allowing such things to happen?
But to come back to the rotational system and the weeks off school, this has now made the same system that failed our teachers, introduce POPIA. They want it to be illegal to publicise the results because "children are traumatised".
Am I the only one who doesn't believe that lie? This was to me a way to cover the system's blemishes. It was never about the children, but about covering the failure of the current government.
We all know that today the pass mark is 30%. Is that not something ridiculous? If you do not know, I know that teachers were ordered not to fail any child.
Now that the court has ordered the department “to publish the National Senior Certificate results on public platforms (media platforms) as was the practice in previous years, concurrently with making available the results to the schools that had been attended by the learners”, we will see how this government has failed us and our children.
As much as I am not an education expert or a well versed educationalist I still believe that with the pandemic of the past two years, the system should have good measures in place for schools. Don’t ask how, but we should have learned better from the first year of the pandemic.
Having said all this, I wish all our children the best. I would hate to say, you must reap what you sow.
Lastly, big up to the 18-year-old Pretoria girl who made the court application challenging this. I know we will say she did that because she had all the advantages over those from the townships. But in defending her, I will say, she has exposed the government’s failures.