Youth Day should be a celebration of real progress for our youth

Youth Day should be a celebration of real progress for our youth, not just a commemoration of violence and inequality in the past (the Bantu Education Act and the Soweto Uprising).

There is every reason for us not to forget Youth Day. On this day, we should be focusing on what the government is doing or not doing to provide rich, stimulating and supportive learning environments for the next generation. 

Our power to change things lies not in looking back but at the past, but in what we do and the decisions we make in the present. 

A motorboat provides a great analogy. Looking back at the wake created behind the boat and blaming the wake (the past) for where we find ourselves now, is hardly helpful. It is disempowering, disrespectful and shows we have learnt nothing from the past. Our power lies in the motor on the boat right now. It needs fuel and it needs to be steered and guided to get where we want to go – to a healthy place that serves us all.

WHAT COULD HELP?

Here are a few suggestions:

• Parent education – learning starts at home and doesn’t only happen between the four walls of a classroom or between the covers of books
• Bringing back proper teacher training colleges
• Inviting experienced teachers out of retirement to twin with younger teachers
• Inviting retired principals out of retirement to coach current principals on school management and leadership
• Increasing the teacher to learner ratio
• Providing high-quality preschool education for all with teachers properly trained in early childhood development right from the start.
• Training up and employing more learning support, remedial teachers and therapists to deal with the growing number of children needing remediation for learning gaps in the foundation phase.
• Inviting the international volunteers to help in our schools as teachers aides. Too many of our 25 000+ schools have 5 teachers for 500 children. They could do with more manpower. The buildings get repainted and refreshed every election year but the teacher-learner ratio doesn’t change!
• On that note, perhaps if we had foreign teacher aides working here we might just have to improve basic aspects in our schools that are often parlous including water, sanitation, electricity, desks, chairs and even supplies of stationery and books. This, to avoid bad foreign press about the poor conditions many of our learners and educators find themselves in
• Maintaining and improving infrastructure to attract investment and support business growth
• Building a robust economy and broadening the tax base
• Fighting corruption – apart from misappropriation of funds it is a terrible example to our youth.

May this Youth Day remind our country’s leaders that they are giving our youth both fuel and direction. Currently, they are putting the future of our nation and every citizen within it, not just our youth, at enormous risk year on year. 

Let’s hope that, one day, Youth Day will be a celebration of real progress for our youth, not just a commemoration of violence and inequality in the past.