Education: South Africa’s shameful human rights failure
The Editor of the Saturday Star wrote a searing article headlined “Our Schools of Shame” on 10 September. Dealing with the shameful deficiencies of many of our schools, it depicted the plight of thousands of pupils whose educational needs and human rights are ignored. The article deserved a major reaction but I have seen little if any.
A few weeks before that, the media gave vast coverage day after day to the controversy about the codes of conduct at a few schools like Pretoria Girls’ High that prevented girls from wearing their hair the way they felt entitled to. The reaction in the social media was often hysterical and the schools were accused of violating the girls’ human rights.
This human rights issue received top-level attention from among others, Mr Panyaza Lesufi, Gauteng MEC for Education. He rushed over to Pretoria to take personal charge of the situation and ensured the adaptation of the school code of conduct that was indeed in some respects outdated and insensitive to the changing demographics of the school.
As a result, girls will be able to wear their hair in Afro styles and this great school can get on with providing an excellent education to children fortunate enough to be learners there, as it has done for around a hundred years.
Now that the young women learners at this school have successfully defended their own human rights, perhaps they can be encouraged to look around them and insist that Mr Lesufi and others do something about the human rights of the tens of thousands of learners whose human rights deprivation extends somewhat further than hairdos.