On Education
Below, I share a reflection that I wrote in 2015. At the time, my family was settling into Atlanta from Johannesburg. I thought often about my daughters’ experiences at school.
On the topic of education…
As both our daughters quickly accepted our family-transition from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Atlanta, USA, education with all its opportunities and limitations became our family-focus, as it always has been and as it always will be.
Noting the teenage years of transitioning from childhood to adulthood, compounded by the 6-month difference in the start of the American academic year, we embarked on the onerous task of introducing our kids into the Atlanta education system. The foreign culture and the education curriculum proved to be a challenge for our girls. Our saving grace was aligning our own view and practice of emotional creative learning, ecl, in all the years of raising our two daughters in the context of the world of education, with the new experiences.
The education of a child is similar to a rubber band that stretches between home and school. Both home and school play a vital part in the education of the child. With this deep understanding, all the cultural differences between Africa and America seemed surmountable by us, and this eased our frustrations as a family. Our understanding of emotions, our understanding of creativity and our understanding of learning are shared between these two pools of people on either side of the Atlantic; it is similar but with different levels of respect or empathy for the other.
This difference may stem from the lack of need to better understand how the other thinks or for what outcomes; outcomes which are for the greater whole of the human population. In SA we aim to integrate, and in America we are finding that the focus is to separate. Separation between home and school, with little extensions of one into the other, separation of the economic classes, separation of the race groups, separation of cultures within a culture and the separation from the rest of the world. I almost shouldn’t compare SA to America, but rather compare SA to Atlanta, as other parts of America may differ, but hardly likely.
In SA, having lived under government legislation and policies that limited human development and human potential, in areas of education, careers and job opportunity for most of our lives, we had transitioned to ‘true’ freedom in 1994, under the leadership of Dr. Nelson Mandela. Freedom, as we understood it, is making ourselves available for emotions, making ourselves available for creativity and making ourselves available for learning, all by our own permission, within our countries’ legislations. We could choose if we wanted to be good students (depending on our own efforts to learn, to study and to excel) or if we wanted to be students who merely obeyed their parents and the requirements of the laws; laws which prescribed children to attend school as a minor, irrespective of a child wishing to learn what was taught or not. If we chose not to learn what was taught in the school curriculum, then we stood to risk the economic outcomes for our future, with no one else to blame but ourselves. What we experienced in Atlanta was the same as in Johannesburg, the choice to be educated or not. Education in Atlanta is with less focus on acceptance of students based on poor race-relations. While we were focusing on how similar individuals were within and between the race groups in SA, America seemed to be focusing on how different the individuals were within and between race groups; all this energy seemed to compromise the use of all the resources that America has in the field of education. The education-resources that Africa and most parts of the world are dying for.
The biggest threat to the rest of the world is the degree of influence that America has on the rest of the world. If America gets it right, then the world can rest easy as the rest of the world copies most practices from America, from pop culture to fashion to education. So if America doesn’t get it right in education, the world stands at great risk. America’s educational sector is not getting it right at the moment, contrary to what the media leads us to believe. The parents that are getting it right in America, and in Atlanta, are similar to those parents that are getting it right in Africa. The same could be said for parents in many other countries. Parents that are getting it right, are participating in the education process of the child, together with the school.
ALL these parents, across the world understand that THEY need to supplement the education provided in schools to their children. The brand of Educators across the world has changed over the recent decades, not correlating with the demands of children, demands of economies, demands of parenting or the demands of technology. Peer pressure is rife and overpowering for children of all ages. The need to belong does not seem to be satiated, nowhere in the short term nor the long term. Just as race groups integrate, new economic classes formulate to extrapolate separation and segregation, distracting from the efforts of education; and distracting from the sense of belonging.
Understanding this background, as an ordinary parent on the ground, allows me to write this article with sensitivity and heart. The heart of knowing that children deserve more and need more, than what is provided to them, by all our societies across the world. In Atlanta, there is little appreciation of each other as individuals, as human beings in the middle of capitalist America; the need to survive the rat-race with minimum effort and with minimum attention to each other’s emotional needs precipitated in the schools. There is little passion for learning, little passion for teaching, little to no passions for progress. The progress that the media extends through CNN to South Africa and the rest of the world is that of a severe minority of Americans who try to better the American race. I note how my children coming from Johannesburg, a concrete jungle, are coming with a tenacious-softness for human development, a passion for learning, and a worldliness that only children of Africa seek and slowly find.
In America, which is regarded as a developed society, progress is limited very heavily by the presence of lawyers, on every turn. Educators are as afraid of parents as doctors are afraid of patients; neither is too far from a lawsuit, depending on the reasonability and mind of the other. This results in wastage of resources, wastage of human energy and wastage of aspiring to the wrong role models. We continued our own supplementation to the education of our daughters, from the home, as we transitioned from Africa to America. We noted and harnessed the excellence of the school curriculum and of the educators, but we were mindful of the gaps and shortcomings. This helped us supplement appropriately and timeously. Our frustrations with the education systems started in SA, but we were more accepting of the limitations within the school systems in SA, thinking that this was a result of living in a developing nation, still transitioning to economic freedom and finding a place on the world stage.
But seeing the same need for parent supplementation in Atlanta, and the same efforts required as parents, over and above our day jobs to create income and food for the family, was an eye opener. The average American would expect this too if they were to travel out of America to Africa, but we didn’t expect this in our situation. It would be an understatement to say that we were shocked, frustrated and disappointed. Nevertheless we were equipped with 10 years of experience and this held us in good stead. While we acknowledged the excellent educators, the excellent parts of the academic curriculum, we noted where the improvements were required and plugged in. Most of the time, it is with the motivation and time-management of the student itself. The increasing pace of life, the distracted parent, the information overloaded era that we all live in, leaves very few filters. Parents are required for new senses of discipline themselves to become new types of examples to their offspring. The school curriculum doesn’t offer these filters or the inclination for these filters.
Educators in Atlanta are the same as in all or most other parts of the world. There is good and bad, dedicated and dead wood, passionate and miserable, the best and the worst educators here and there. As I understand it educators are people, just like you and I, and we all live in a system that is not improving in the near future. The only part that we can control as parents in the system of education is to educate ourselves, about what we can do to supplement the education provided to our children. We do not have the luxury of time to wait until the education system is fixed or if it improves. As parents, we have to step in now to augment the education of our children.
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