Children are not failures!

"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know". (John Taylor Gatto).

Which is worse? Saying that the "system" has failed pupils? Or that teachers have failed them? Or that they themselves have failed?

Some members of the press are having a field day over the word "failure" and matric results. What does this actually mean?

Teachers are not failures unless they have been totally negating their duties in a class. And children are not failures - whether or not they pass matric - unless they have chosen to go down totally self-destructive paths.

Many successful businessmen and women were not successful in school. A matric certificate is no guarantee of success in life. It seems that crucial aspects like character, principles, honour, decency, cheerfulness, patience, diligence etc have been totally overlooked in the matric result witch hunt.

There seems to be a complete over-emphasis on value of marks and pieces of paper as opposed to value of human beings, their opinions, feelings and spirit.

Judgement and condemnation of teenagers is a sure way to brand them with the mark of failure. Encouragement, perseverance and hope are paths to success.

John Taylor Gatto, former New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year wrote the book "Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling". He spent 26 years as a teacher and quit because he said he could no longer participate in a system that destroys lives by destroying minds.

Very simply, he made a list of "The 20 Qualities of an Educated Person." In compiling this list, Gatto reviewed answers to questionnaires given to a number of corporate personnel managers and college admission officers. According to these two
groups, an educated person would demonstrate:

1. A broadly knowledgeable mind
2. Self confidence
3. A life purpose
4. A touch of class
5. Good leadership skills
6. The ability to work with a team
7. Patience
8. Good public speaking skills
9. Good writing skills
10. Resourcefulness
11. A desire for responsibility
12. Honesty
13. A public spirit
14. The ability to work well alone
15. An eye for details
16. The ability to focus at will
17. Perseverance
18. The ability to handle pressure
19. Curiosity
20. An attractive personal style

These do not have much to do with marks. They focus on character.
In his speech, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” Gatto describes seven lessons that he says are taught in all public schools by all teachers in America, whether they know it or not.

He wrote: "The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach dis-connections…."

"The second lesson I teach is class position….The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class….You come to know your place.

"The third lesson I teach is indifference….When the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch.

"The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.

"The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency...[Only], the teacher can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.

"The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem….The lesson of report cards, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.

"The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach students they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues...The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.

Gatto states that current US education systems teach children: "how to be a good "Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid…Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching...all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius.

So what is the answer? According to Gatto: "Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete with government education. I’m trying to describe a free market in schooling exactly like the one the country had until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind of education that suits them, even if that means self-education; it didn’t hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see".

South Africa is blessed in having a number of alternative options available to children - to choose where they will fit in and where they will bloom. This freedom of choice should be supported and reinforced so that no child is branded a failure.