Sequel+to+school+pledge+outrage,+Sue+Blaine,+Weekender

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=Sequel to school pledge outrage=


 * Sue Blaine, Business Day Weekender, 16 February 2008**

//Education experts see youth responsibilities bill as a damaging and desperate move//

The furore that erupted when Education Minister Nadeli Pandor released the government’s proposed school pledge is set to intensify next week, when Pandor and Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein introduce the Bill of Responsibilities for the Youth of SA.

The bill is largely Goldstein’s creation. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he says. I presented the idea to (Pandor) and she liked it.

“Then I took it to the NLRF (National Religious Leaders Forum) and they liked the idea.”

Goldstein and Pandor presented the idea to President Thabo Mbeki at a meeting he had with the NLRF last year. “He (Mbeki) endorsed it and said, ‘Go ahead, implement it.’ Then I sat down and wrote it,” Goldstein says.

The school pledge has sparked public outrage as it comes at a time when the education system is in a crisis, with South African learners scoring badly on international literacy and maths tests.

The bill is likely to fuel further outrage as it enshrines a set of values that have not been commonly accepted by parents.

The draft bill, based on the constitution’s bill of rights, then became the subject of an “e-mail conference”, after he wrote it, the Chief Rabbi says.

But Goldstein and education department director-general Duncan Hindle are adamant the bill is not a religious document. “If anything, people may say this document doesn’t mention God,” he says. “Obviously as religious leaders we’d want to include (God), but it is the flip side of the bill of rights. It is the minimum necessary to build a great society.”

“Rubbish!” says Jonathan Jansen, honorary professor of education at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).

“ What really gets me concerned is that we have a (former) police commissioner who’s being charged, a president of the African National Congress who’s being charged and a president who has been hugely irresponsible, especially with regard to HIV/AIDS,” he says.

“We are faced with a moral crisis within our leadership and we want kids to chant oaths and bills.

“The best way to inspire children — and I know this from years of being a teacher — is to behave morally yourself. That’s the way you secure a sense of values. If you think you can legislate normative behaviour then you are mistaken.”

The bill opens with a preamble: “I accept the call to responsibility that comes with the many rights and freedoms that I have been privileged to inherit from the sacrifice and suffering of those who came before me.”

It lists 12 “responsibilities” that flow from the rights in the constitution — amended slightly. The “responsibility to not discriminate unfairly” does not include grounds of sexual orientation as stated in the constitution; and the right to family or parental care in the bill states that children should recognise that “love means a long-term commitment, and the responsibility to establish strong and loving families”.

The bill is an educational, not legal, document, says Goldstein. “It should be up on the walls (at schools), so that children have a chance to study it in depth, to make it real and part of their lives.”

The notion of a pledge — and by extension the bill of responsibilities — is educationally unsound, says Prof Mary Metcalfe, dean of the Wits education faculty and a former politician. “It is fundamentally uneducational. If (Pandor) wants children to grapple with values, let’s grapple with them, not recite them,” she says.

While there is a definite need for children to examine values, the pledge and bill are the wrong place to start because there has been no process through which South Africans could explore what values they support, Metcalfe says.

Pandor is not the first education minister to put forward the idea of a pledge for school children. Former education minister Kader Asmal also did so during his tenure, says Metcalfe.

“Kader led this huge project on rights and values. T here was a research report, there were programmes of action. Now there is this sudden top-down approach. What happened to Kader’s idea? It was abandoned,” she says.

Worse, it was shot down, says Jansen. “Kader, to his credit, didn’t push it too hard. He put it out there … and there was a huge outcry against the notion. Imagine my surprise when the president announced it in his state of the nation (address).”

Asking children to recite an oath or make a pledge of allegiance is the sign of a government in trouble, scrambling for support, says Jansen. “We need to ask, w hy now? Why again? The government is in trouble, it needs to deliver on a lot of fronts,” he says.

But pledges and bills of responsibilities will not help, nor will they create patriotism in children who struggle daily with widespread illiteracy and “the systemic dysfunction of the educational system,” says Jansen.

“It will only do more damage, things need to be fixed first (and) we need to create critical citizens.

“(This) forces people to collapse the distinction between their responsibility to the state and the country.”

Goldstein argues that SA needs a moral infrastructure as much as it needs a physical one.

“There is great value in articulating values. Everyone recognises a great society is built on values such as integrity,” Goldstein says.

The bill of responsibilities is not a finished document and its power lies it its simplicity and its drawing on “the most legitimate document we have, the constitution”, he says.

“It forms the scaffolding we need to give people the space to build on it.”


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/weekender/article.aspx?ID=BD4A707580**

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