The story about school children, teachers and parents in Mpumalanga teaming up to cheat in this year’s matriculation examinations should have knocked the stuffing out of all right thinking South Africans.
What have we become?
According to the story, thousands of pupils paid R1 500 to belong to a WhatsApp group with teachers who leaked answers to some question papers.
Although the story does not say so, I include parents because I just find it hard to imagine pupils having that kind of money to subscribe to the cheating WhatsApp group.
What kind of teachers are these that will help pupils cheat?
We have seen several disturbing happenings in our society that have left some of us gasping for air. We have seen the community of Vuwani infamously torching several schools because they were aggrieved by the municipal demarcation that put them in a municipality they didn’t like for ethnic reasons. What about the future of their children?
This is the extreme.
More often is the phenomenon where adults are unhappy about something, and they pull children out of school and force them to join protests.
The society that most of us grew up knowing would protect and shield its children against conflict situations. But more importantly, insist that they attend to their education.
In the massive looting of July last year in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, ostensibly to protest the jailing of Jacob Zuma for defying the Constitutional Court, we saw legions of children joining adults in these deplorable and criminal activities.
Are we teaching our children, at early ages, that it is okay to steal and vandalise other people’s property? That it is fine to eat in your home stolen food, wear stolen clothes and use microwaves, stoves and fridges that were stolen?
Of course, wrongdoing by adults in our society is commonplace. We cannot pretend that the young are short of crooked role models.
Who can forget the personal protective equipment scandal? As our people were lying in hospitals and others dying from Covid-19 infections, some among us were forming bogus companies to steal money set aside to protect our brave and hard-working health workers and other essential services providers.
As this piece is read, the governing party is holding its electing conference and accusations of vote buying are flying about. It is not so much hard-hitting debates about lofty ideas to pull our society out of poverty and other ills that dominate the
atmosphere, but accusations of vote-buying and how to prevent it.
What happened to old-fashioned debates and the election of office-bearers on the strength of their noble attributes?
School children deserve teachers who are positive role models.
Together with parents and adults in communities, they are expected not only to teach children to read, write and calculate, and generally acquire knowledge and skills that would make them valuable members of society, but also to be ethical beings that know the difference between right and wrong.
There is no criminal justice system strong enough to deal with a society bereft of ethics and morality on an industrial scale.
It boggles the mind imagining what we are to become if we are now grooming our young to become adults without a moral compass.
Cry the beloved country!
- Mosibudi Mangena is former minister of science and technology
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