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Hardly a month goes by
without a newspaper headline like "Pupil found with
drugs" or "Pupil shot over cellphone".
This Tuesday Special Assignment asks: are our schools
seats of learning, or hot-beds of violence?
On one hand the pupils
appear to be unruly and ill-disciplined. On the other,
teachers in schools say they feel physically threatened
and have no way of disciplining the learners. Over and
over we heard the cry, we teach in fear.
This Tuesday Special
Assignment attempts to unravel the factors behind the
apparent state of anarchy in some of our schools. We
meet a Soweto high school learner, who, together with
some of his friends, feels the need to carry a weapon to
class. But what is driving this need? Is the violence
bred inside, or outside the school gates?
In Kwa-Zulu/Natal we meet
a teacher who has to carry a gun to school to protect
himself from thugs outside the school gate. Inside this
primary school, we hear how violence has become an
everyday part of these children's lives. At another
school - temporarily closed - pupils went on the rampage
recently. They seriously assaulted a group of teachers
whom they suspected of having "love affairs"
with the school's girl pupils. At yet another school
parents are 'reclaiming' the school, after a pupil was
shot dead recently.
In Mpumalanga we meet
teachers who have experienced violence inside the school
gates. This includes being robbed at gunpoint, to being
accused by pupils of witchcraft, to being stoned because
of belonging to a different ethnic group to the pupils.
In another extreme case, a teacher was found guilty of
abducting and torturing a pupil she suspected of theft.
These alarming events
raise an important question and one that education
authorities appear to have neglected: how can the
nation's children be educated if they are not safe
inside the school gates?
This documentary is
directed by award-winning journalist, Khadija Magardie,
and is filmed by Byron Taylor and edited by Hannes van
Vuuren.
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