My week has been a rush again and so I haven’t been writing as much as I would like. Today is going to focus on education which intersects so many different fields and relates to some of my work at Philani as well. This morning for our service learning class, we had a guest lecturer from UCT that spoke on education in the Western Cape province. He was from a very interesting background having done graduate work at UCT before becoming a teacher in Khayelitsha in 1984. He worked there until after the fall of Apartheid and is now a professor at UCT. He has really experienced both worlds and it was really obvious how much that was affecting him.
To begin the class, we watched a documentary style film about the first class of students to graduate from high school without ever being schooled in Apartheid. The website for the documentary is testinghope.com. These students were from Nyanga, one of the townships outside of Cape Town and very close to the clinics I work in with Philani. In order to graduate, students must take and pass a test called “Matric.” The film followed these students from Nyanga in the weeks leading up to the Matric exam and then afterwards. To these students, Matric is their key to the future. One of the students in the film went so far as to say that getting Matric would “make my life really, really great.” They hang so much value on passing this exam. They think that if they do succeed, it will dramatically change their lives. Unfortunately, as the film showed, this is sadly not the case.
I really felt for the several students that they followed in the film. All of the ones they followed passed their exams, but they still remained subject to their own circumstances. One of the students had a past in gang activity and though he passed the exam, he was ultimately murdered just a few years after the film was completed. Another girl had dreams of being a lawyer, but her mother didn’t like that she was studying so much and thought she should learn to cook and clean the house. Though she enrolled in a paralegal course, she became pregnant at the age of 19 and was ultimately trapped by her experiences. Yet another girl had dreams of being a doctor and she succeeded in entering a technical school after the exam to become a nurse, but her family could not afford it and she was forced to leave the school. The last of the students they followed hits me perhaps the hardest of all of them. This boy had the entire expectations of his family on his shoulders. Though his single mother had several other children, she was pouring all of her resources into him so that he could lift them out of poverty when he graduated and went to university. He had dreams of being a civil engineer and supporting his family to bring them out of Nyanga. He did the very best he could and ended up receiving the highest marks in the school on his Matric exam. Despite his score, he was unable to gain admission to UCT. In fact, he had less than half of the mark required for entry into the engineering program. Even though he was the best in all of Oscar Mpetha High School, he was so far behind the rest of South Africa. He is currently taking a preparatory course to retake his Matric exams hoping for a higher score, but the movie had no final information on the results of his pursuits.
The best in Nyanga was half as good as the minimum requirements to enter UCT. This is hardly unique to Nyanga. In South Africa, 95% of whites pass the Matric exams compared to 61% of blacks. At Oscar Mpetha High School, only 36.5% of the class passed their Matric exams in 2006. The levels continued to decline from when this movie was filmed. Recent data from the townships around Cape Town, which includes thousands of black children, is very disheartening. Grade 9 learners in the townships were told to take the Grade 8 standardized test and only 124 black students from the townships around Cape Town achieved a 50% on the test. That is less than 0.1% of all black students in this region. How do we even begin to comprehend the disadvantages of those in this community?
We have to look at why this is the case. So much of this comes down to what has been termed “structural violence,” which are structural disadvantages that are innate either culturally or on a governmental level that ultimately harm the individuals in that environment. The students in the film very clearly illustrate some of these boundaries. So many things are valued above schooling in the townships. If someone is working too hard in school they are accused of thinking that they are better than the people they are surrounded by. This plagued the student who was ultimately killed in gang violence. It was almost unavoidable for him in Nyanga where there are 400-500 murders every year, many gang related. Others can’t break free of the cultural roles that are so ingrained in their culture. The girl who got pregnant was trapped in this way. She was told all her life that her purpose was to bear children and remain in the home and ultimately that cultural position caught up with her. So many people think that Matric will solve all of their problems, but they place too much faith in it. When they finally do get there, they realize that they are still in an environment with a 40% unemployment rate and many still cannot find jobs or make it in higher education. I have really witnessed these structural disadvantages in the mothers that come into Philani. They are trapped by their environment.
South Africa may say that education in colorblind, but by that they only mean they are blind to the huge discrepancies faced by different populations of different races. If they truly saw that schools in black communities have declined since Apartheid, then surely they would have done something about it.
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