Death amongst the cheeseboys

This past couple of weeks has brought the growing ‘problem’ of schoolchild violence into sharp perspective again. Ten days ago schoolboys at two upper-middle-class, established Monastic State schools [i.e. single sex schools], were involved in extra-mural violence of an unsupervised sort. The result: beatings, stabbings and death. Now that I have got my own form of school aggression out of my hair for the moment in the form of matric prelim’ assessments, at the school where I work on a part time basis, and the associated flood of paperwork that has kept me from this machine for weeks, I would like to comment on this ‘sudden’ phenomenon.her hand that situation has been, for me in any event, rare. I confiscated a fifteen-centimetre flick-knife off a tenth grade kid, who attempted to use it on me requiring me to hit him with a loose section of desk, for the first time in 1973. His parent’s attorney successfully sued for its return even though at that time it was illegal to own such a knife; and no ‘sporting’ knife over four inches [roughly nine centimetres] could be legally imported into the country. On the other hand it is possible that the headmaster, a pleasant, broken man, who was usually on his third or forth drink by first break, and eventually died some years later of cirrhosis, simply gave it back: rather than deal with some powerful parents. It happens.

That was a so-called White school under the old fascist model whereby young lads were thrashed with a stick [called a “cane”], and girls routinely submitted to public underwear inspections to establish that they were wearing regulation knickers.

My personal primary school experience [on the far east end of Ekuruleni] was one of violence of child on child with often only the rigorous intervention of some ”Onnie”: a man armed with a stick, to keep us from tearing each other apart. My personal high school experience was no better. I still remember with stark clarity a dozen or more occasions when I, the school geek, had to work up courage to tackle bullies who were making my life unbearable.

I was eight when I first used a knife on someone. I had saved up for it and bought it from a shop in town.… I was eight and the shopkeeper explained to me that when using a knife it is better to slash than to stab, but that the main purpose of owning a knife, he said enigmatically to me, was to cut a decent slice of a steak. He was an Engelsman from "over there", like me. He also knew it was normal for a kid to carry a knife.

Broadly though it was not a local “White”- thing: to use knives. It was fists and sometimes boots. I do have a scar on my head though from a blow from a piece of steel that I had mostly blocked with a stick before it hit me with intent to kill, during a gang fight in the park outside the Park Hotel. Then I was about fourteen. By the time I left school I was generally left alone. I was a kid who always fought ‘dirty’. I had been in more fights than most people had eaten breakfasts, and I was still the school geek, albeit a savagely rebellious one.

In the years following the Revolution, the so-called Model C schools were overwhelmed with guns and knives. The townships weren’t places where one used fists. Sensible older men carried knobkierries and in the neighbourhood next to where I live now the main weapon of choice was a sharpened bicycle spoke. When I moved to Jozi in ‘64 at the age of 17 I had to walk from Hillbrow to the corner of Troye and Commissioner to work, and was advised by all to avoid Noord Street and the infamous “murder mile” that lay across my path between the two places. Later I lived in a coldwater flat in Braamfontein where the Braamie gang held sway, and one had to tread carefully to avoid being whacked with a bicycle chain. I was so used to "treading carefully" that my nickname became "Cautious Katie".

During one year in that era immediately after the revolution though, I confiscated fifteen guns and an almost unlimited quantity of knives, at one of the places where I was working as a substitute Teacher. All of these weapons went to the “office” and were generally reclaimed later by their owners. As I have said schools are violent and scary places for many people. School's often have the children of notorious gangsters in their classrooms, and there have been schools in which I worked where it was expedient to carry two guns [so you had a spare in case the kids got one of them off you.].

And so the airwaves this past week have been filled with the usual anguished replays; of the same anguished replays; of the same anguished replays: as we dance yet again our agonised ritual “latest crisis’, which is simply an all-action replay of the same previous crisis with an altered cast. Surprisingly however on this occasion the MEC [Member of the Executive Council] for Education for the Gauteng [Zone One] administrative region decided to call the devil for what it was. She referred to “black learners” that, she said, “have become a menace to society:” an undoubted side-reference to more than just the killing of Mfundo “Chunky” Ntshangase last week. [City Press 23/09/07].

Recent headlines in the Sunday Times speak of record numbers of school information processing agents [formerly called “teachers”] taking stress leave. Death threats are routine in the “blackboard jungle”, itself a well-worn cliché from an earlier age of school violence: used with unconscious irony to illustrate a current issue: the “immanent crisis” in schools. Girls are apparently raped routinely in many schools and schoolgirl pregnancy is at a record high, and may even have been higher had so many girls not taken to carrying weapons.

According to the MEC a hugely disproportionate number of violent incidents in schools involve so-called “black” kids. David Maimela of the SA Student’s Congress disputed her remark as lacking scientific evidence. However I suspect that the good MEC can produce such hard evidence that would prove her statement to be no mere hypothesis.

While I would dispute that aggressive behaviour in SA schools is specifically a “black” thing [whatever “black” is], the probability that such aggression would be accompanied with lethal force using hard weaponry is more inclined, in my experience to be a “black” thing. I do not have a long term forecast on this remaining so however, and when I write a similar blog ten or so years from now I am sure that it will be to report the rising incidence of shooting deaths amongst white schoolkids as the next generation begin to copy the ruling peer-group model.

I no longer confiscate knives, I no longer work in the kind of school where it seems to be needed, and it is a pretty orthodox multi-cultural, multi-class school. In any event I do not have the legal right to search for them [nor do I want it… I didn’t join up to be a policeperson.].

Kids always used to tell me that they the weapons are needed as much for the journey as for the school. Since the random probability of being assaulted on the streets is relatively high I would not like to be the one who prevents a kid from protecting him/herself, even though I feel that the “Law of attraction” means that carrying a weapon may raise the likelihood of needing one.

“Bring back the cane” cry the “bringemuptough” lobby and the other team cry “spare-them-the-angst” of brutal compulsion.

So what then can this blogger add to the flames of anxiety sweeping the nation on this, amongst so many issues that seem never to be resolved?

Nothing.

The problem is insoluble. It was bad before; it is a disaster in the making now. Just as the architects of the hated Bantu Education System were in blind denial about what they were doing; so too the new administration is in blind denial that their beloved egalitarian, modern Outcomes based system is leading to an unintended outcome, that is rapidly approaching meltdown. This violence is not sporadic neither will it “go away”.

Unless a way can be found and found quickly to move the entire assessment based administrative burden that is paralysing the system onto the internet somehow and free the classroom manger to actually interact with the kids instead of spending their days madly completing forests of assessments and assessments and assessments that take weeks worth of hours and leave the kids free to roam... And no one is listening to this plea because this assessment obsession is at the heart of a system that is totalitarian in its implementation.

In addition the system uses the coercion of compulsory miseducation to achieve its outcomes, which are barely understood by its enforcers. There is no escape... this control is more total than the architects of Apartheid ever dreamed of in their wildest ideological fantasies. The only escape is the one we are witness too currently. Therefore when coercion is an input, violence is ordained as an outcome. The violence is also inevitable since kids are not stupid and know when a system is rigged against them. All this violence can be seen in class terms: i.e. How dare someone have a better shot at the golden ring than me; it isn’t fair and so I’ll kill the other fuckers and ‘they’ll’ be sorry.

The whole system favours elites and there is no alternative that an under performing kid can aspire to. Most kids under perform at some or other time.. fixing that is what teaching used to be about... now there isn't time in the frantic programme ordained by the new mistresses of wanton compulsory mis education have ordained.

This violence is a symptom of frustration, anxiety and straightforward envy founded on a dismal sense of loss and failure, and the blind knowledge that one is inherently superfluous. They are locked into a system that also actively discriminates against male performance models in favour of females; and so male violence is not only normal it is now inevitable.

Because of our history, the education business is dominated by women; and many of those in policy making positions planning and implementing this new system are resentiment loaded ladies. [Now there is a statement in need of scientific justification Mr Maimela.]

Resentiment is Nietzsche’s term. Note this is not the same word as resentment from which it is derived. He saw its extra dimension as reactionary... spite filled. I find it ironic that resentiment should be the core motivation behind so much school violence, in a place that has recently undergone an incomplete revolution. It suggests to me that we are not listening to the kids and so they are doing what they did in ’76. These are after all, the generation that grew up knowing that violence is the only way to get people’s attention. That is because they learned it at their parent’s knees. “Give me a child until its 7th year and it is mine for life” as the Jesuits’ famously observed. Since this generation never started school before it was 7, their parents had ample opportunity to breathe tales of liberation glory into their children’s heads. Today’s generation are the progeny of the ’76 rebellion.

It was the intention of the now ruling party to make the country ungovernable in their “liberation before education” campaign, [back in the late ’80 and early 90’s, remember.] and they built on the legacy of the ’76 children’s revolution. The government may have deconstructed that glorious event into a booze filled “Youth Day” on the 16th of June ‘76… when the world heard the children cry out for freedom, but this generation grew up on the tale..

This generation of freedom’s children have got the message. That the violence this time is inwardly directed is simply a function of frustration. There are no Casspirs to assault with rock and Molotov. Nonetheless it is there: Khutsong and a load of other places with forgettable and unpronounceable names that have become new dubious dustbins for the masses, are symptomatic objects of that frustration. The downtown Jozi street-traders can testify to that frustration after a few thousand kids rampaged downtown last month, [on Mr Maimela’s watch incidentally just for a piece of scientific evidence.] Last week a so-called “Cheeseboy”: “Chunky”, died as proof; as “cheeseboy” ate “cheeseboy”, in an awful and deadly illustration of the adage that revolutions devour their young.

There is also a rising tide of dead police officers.

What the children are telling us is that this government has, in their revolutionary fervour, introduced a supposedly modern education system that is systematically destroying hope for millions of kids [ and arguably working well for a limited number of nurds, geeks and swots from rich homes or with well resourced ones].

It is significant that this violence is spiking at the time when the first beneficiaries of this new system are in their penultimate ‘matriculation’ year. They are telling us that this system will not do, what we say it will do… Too many are inadequately prepared for what lies ahead. Too many are left alone to discover Newtonian physics for themselves; working it out in poorly supervised dysfunctional workgroups using textbooks that are mostly not worth the crappy paper they are, expensively, written upon.

They are angry at being a second, or is it now the third, generation sacrificed in the interest of a revolution that only seems to benefit the lucky “Cheeseboys”*.

They are discovering, too many of them, that they are superfluous to need and the new Eldorado represented by the revolutionary era is giving way to a desert of broken dreams.

How do you tell sixteen year old kids that there is nothing in the pot for them… In the past you could hit them and make them do it even if they didn’t want to and eventually enough would 'see the light' to go forth and be fruitful.

Now children have rights. They are unaware though that this includes the right to fail and be nobody in life, which is what many are discovering by osmosis. They are [correctly] untouchable… but that doesn’t alter the basic truth that most are superfluous to need and that after years of compulsory schooling they have no skills to lean on that are of any practical use in a world that simply no longer needs armies of educated clerks… How much education do you need to read a script off a computer screen in a call centre? Preferably not too much… just enough to have dulled the imagination that you will never need again.

Nonetheless this violence can be viewed as either a nihilistic denial of the new reality in the form of rejection: or as their call for help.

You must choose what you think it is.


*Cheeseboys: township slang for black boys who go the suburban model c or even better class schools; and can afford to eat cheese, a luxury for most ordinary people.