Before I became an addict of sport on television, I was passionate about martial arts and one of my all-time favourite films was ‘Enter the Dragon’ starring Bruce Lee.
I am reminded of this movie by the famed civil servants industrial action that was only called off after eight weeks.
When everyone thought that the situation was returning to normalcy, into the fray enter furious, brave and crazed students with their guerilla style tactics of unorthodox brand.
The placards, the chanting, the burning of tyres and vegetation, the smashing of classroom windows and invasion of meetings between Parents and Teachers come as a vivid reminder of the Soweto Uprising in 1976 when black South African students violently protested the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools.
They are also a reminder of the nature of students’ riots, which have no rules or code of conduct and often accompanied by indiscriminate destruction of property and loss of human lives even when they were intended to be peaceful.
This should act as a wake up call for my dear country. However, we can be pretty sure that the government led by the self-proclaimed disciplinarian His Excellency President Khama will dismiss the riots as the act of a few rebels who have to be identified as ring leaders and paraded as examples of unwanted dissidents who have to be taken out of school.
Should this come to the fore, Batswana must ready themselves to witness a full blown students’ rebellion that would bring the government on its knees.
Students’ riots in Botswana started as isolated tiny incidents that had all the hallmarks of over-excited anarchists.
However, the riots have since escalated in sporadic fashion. With this as a baseline, there is an urgent need to address the concerns of students before they create the climate that would give students both the justification and the confidence to organize a bloody rebellion.
The continuing students rioting can be read in different ways but my take is that its genesis is the students’ demand for eduction and on this I feel their pain.
The Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MOESD) and the Botswana Examinations Council (BEC) have confessed that the quality of education in public schools is deficient and early this year in an attempt to defuse the suspected impact of the stalemate between teachers and MOESD during the 2010 BGCSE and JCE examinations, the BEC revealed that student performance in public schools has been on the decline for some years. Furthermore, Vision 2016 Coordinator, Dr. Collie Monkge acknowledges that quality of education being offered in public schools still leaves a lot to be desired (The Telegraph, July 28, 2010).
Conversely, students in private schools enjoy a tranquil climate that boosts their learning. Now if you consider that private schools have been out-performing public schools even when there was calm at such schools, you come to realize that the public education system is comatose.
Viewed from this perspective, students in public schools have legitimate concerns and are rightly worried that the obtaining scenario actively cements exclusion whereby those in public schools are assured of limited opportunites for advancement as a result of poor quality education, whereas their peers in private school enjoy uninterrupted learning in a way that gives them inbuilt advantages in the future.
This makes public schools going students justifiably jealous and hostile. In the same manner, public schools going students have probably concluded that the entire generations of the past mostly the spoilt brats in positions of leadership had benefited from quality education of the Tigerkloof standards and the young generation is now getting absolute rubbish that hardly empowers them to master a minimum set of cognitive skills.
The gist of the students’ demand for education centers on what I would call the education gap, which is the gap between the educational aspirations of students and the quality of education the public schools actually provide.
This means that a negative gap, that is if students’ expectations are not fulfilled, is most likely to have a profound impact on feelings and attitudes of students that could compel them to take to the streets and undermine the government that is led by hard faced oldies with a poor sense of education. We certainly cannot expect students to be happy with the poor quality of education they are subjected to especially when their peers in private schools are seemingly in a stroll to the promised land on account of the superior education they get.
The question must be, however, whether the burning of tyres and smashing of classroom windows is a prelude to future unrest or just a one-off pleasure trip by juveniles. Until now, student’s mood in public schools has been quiescent as though they were content with the garbage they were getting. However, my contention is that student’s fury has been fomenting overtime and it was just a matter of time before the system drew the ire of frustrated but significantly cultured, rational and civilized students. Even the best behaved and cowardly students have been pushed just too far after all it is never too late to have a happy childhood.
Students’ rebellions ssem to take place all of a sudden but usually they don’t just come from the blue. Current students riot in Botswana reflect a long process that reached a tipping point and window of opportunity when their teachers joined other public officers in an industrial action. This was the opportune time for them to register their disquiet and direct action seemed their best option to convey the desired message to those in power. The room temperature was perfect and the spectacularly set for the big ocassion.
It is a mystery that the leadership has remained aloof when there were clear signs that a rebellion was building inside classrooms.
This column has long argued, through an essay titled ‘The Botswana Education System on the Verge of Collapse’ ÔÇôSunday Standard, October 11-17th, 2009, that our education system was wrong in everything that ought to be right and that it was failing the nation and corrupting children. Public schools reach the greatest number of children and it is unimaginable how many harderned anarchists and crazed revolutionary zealots are being groomed in public schools.
My postulation is that future governments are going to have plenty of work in their hands to rehabilitate these nice-seeming rebels of the Julius Malema breed that are graduating from public schools in large numbers every year. The answer rests not in setting the rogue riots police on students but in instituting a complete overhaul of the system that will commit us to a fresh start.
In consequence, instead of sprinting from one school to the next like a bogus mobile healer, the Minister of Education and Skills Development should as a matter of urgency, call an education pitso for stakeholders to dialogue and develop a process for the re-birth of the education system.
In tearing up the classrooms, students are not having wild fun but are making their points eloquently and it is up to the leadership of the country to wise up and urgently address the problems afflicting the public education system.
Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us that ‘a riot is the language of the unheard’. Recent events have cultivated a dangerous culture of rebellion in schools and very soon school principals and teachers will be subjected to humiliating punishments by angry students such as being ordered to spin like a chimpanzee at assembly points or recite the Ten Commandments without making any reference to any scripture.
It is always much easier to see troubles in other countries rather than your own, isn’t it?
