Those of you who read my column regularly will know how strongly I feel about education.
I truly believe it’s the only thing that can rescue a nation and lead it to prosperity.
I’ve gone as far as saying that I’d be prepared for government to neglect every other aspect of its duty, so it can pay attention to education only.
PROBLEMATIC: Education is in a shambles
I wouldn’t mind if roads crumbled and refuse went uncollected, as long as all kids had equal and superior education.
Because I know that all it would take is one generation for us to reap the rewards of such a singular focus.
Once all those kids graduated from university that they attended for free, they would go about fixing everything that had broken in that time.
So imagine my disgust when instead I read a story about a principal, a department head and a teacher gang raping one of their girl students.
I bet that’s a sentence you didn’t think you’d ever read.
Plus there’s a video of the whole thing that ended up going viral on social media.
It happened in KZN recently and, of course, there have been arrests, followed by strong words from the authorities and the inevitable investigations.
But there hasn’t been any mention of tackling the cause of the problem and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
There’s another video from the same region, showing a teacher brutally beating up one of his female scholars in the classroom.
He violently pulls and pushes her while beating the screaming girl with a cane with all his strength.
Then, of course, there’s the unbelievable story of 30 girls from the same school in the Northern Cape falling pregnant by three teachers, two of whom have been arrested.
It has since emerged that the number of pregnant school girls is 16 and not 30, as if that’s any better.
There shouldn’t even be one case of a teacher having sex with one of his pupils, never mind impregnating her.
Instead we have statistics showing that in the 2014/15 financial year, 56 teachers countrywide were struck from the SA Council of Educators roll for sexually abusing pupils.
That amounts to more than one case for every week of the year.
How did we get to a time where the one place where we trust our kids are safe and protected, they are instead brutalised?
Well, I reckon this is what happens when you have moral decay happening from the top down.
When the country’s leaders cannot provide moral guidance, then their public servants feel no need to act with any kind of decency.
When one of the top executives in the education department assaults a woman and is then defended by a female political leader, what message does that send to male teachers?
And let’s not even talk about what it does to the country’s moral compass that the president was the defendant in a rape trial.
We’ve got the money and resources to tackle education a whole lot better and to ensure a prosperous future for the country.
But could there be truth to the conspiracy theory that government doesn’t want to educate the masses, because they fear what an education for all would mean?