Prof Jonathan Jansen is an independent thinker and “public nuisance” as he puts it; not one to pussyfoot around systemic failure in South Africa’s education system. While he doesn’t fixate on the role of the government in his enlightening book, Worth the Fight: Fixing Failure in South African Schools, he advises bluntly that it needs to “get out of the way”.
Jansen isn’t referring to the government’s vital role in creating an environment for school change by providing the resources every school and teacher needs, especially those “at the whipping end of an unequal system”. Instead, he says, the state has to stop interrupting valuable teaching time during the school day. He points to the growing burden of administration that “sucks the lifeblood out of teachers” coupled with a relentless demand for quick turnarounds. Jansen’s view is independently supported by a new survey revealing that more than 60% of principals are burning out and considering quitting.
Jansen argues in the book, published on August 7, that government bureaucracies are still strongly characterised by an apartheid-era “top-down, authority-driven sense of power” over schools and their subjects. The problem, as he points out, is there is no silver bullet when it comes to turning around a school’s culture.
The Stellenbosch University education professor and prolific author discovered this firsthand when he went back to the classroom, volunteering as an external change agent after a school in his childhood neighbourhood on the Cape Flats — given the fake name Cherry High — recorded the worst matric pass rate in the Western Cape in 2023 at 35.9%. Jansen taught grade 10 physical science while searching for urgent, lasting fixes at the school, which was plagued by dysfunction, including teacher and pupil absenteeism. It was this experience that forms the core of his account.
“One of the main reasons policy is ineffectual is that it is normed according to middle-class values and priorities far removed from the turbulence and inequalities of working-class schools. Even if we produce more policies than even the French, as one wit suggested, they do not speak to the material conditions of schools in impoverished communities,” he writes. When schools perform poorly, Jansen notes a cruel paradox at play: “The official [state] interventions at schools like Cherry are the same ones that unintentionally undermine teaching and learning in the classroom.”
Jansen faced this reality too, after his own assumptions were turned upside down upon returning to class. He argues that policy reform and evaluation must recognise the inseparable connection between the school and the home — a central thrust explored across eight thematic chapters.
His memoir as a social scientist is peppered with anecdotes highlighting the harsh realities faced by children and teachers in working-class homes — heartbreaking circumstances that Jansen stresses cannot be disentangled from the classroom. To illustrate this with one example, Jansen quotes Charlene, who is in matric: “I go home to our small council dwelling and there are 15 people in the house and in the back rooms. Nobody works. There is no food. There are days when I do not eat. Nobody wishes me on my birthday. When I get some money here or there, I buy food for everyone. My mother lives somewhere else. I don’t know about my father.”
In his chapter on “character”, the principal’s leadership role takes centre stage. Jansen admits he would not have tackled the turnaround project had the principal been weak. She stepped into the role in 2023, the year of the school’s devastating results. Jansen believed in her capability, and she welcomed him to the team.
“For 22 months I would peer inside the soul of my principal,” he writes. “What the principal saw in one neglected learner is what she sees every day. A child impregnated by a much older man, a learner who waits for her mother to come home from work to avoid being harassed by other adults. Young girls whose leg bones were broken by an abusive man in the house. A youngster who had not eaten for the day. These in-your-face presentations of poverty, violence and harassment would break any school leader, but the principal of Cherry had found ways to hold her emotions together in ways that were impressive, even remarkable, but always measured.”
The professor highlights creative incentives and motivations that are often unavailable in financially strapped schools: breakfast in Kalk Bay; treat runs to fast-food joints; field trips to the West Coast; rides on Cape Town’s sightseeing Red Bus; and trips up Table Mountain on the cable car. Some grade 10 science students even travelled to China. Jansen sourced 100 raincoats through his Facebook network and secured discounted dental treatments and medicine from supportive businesses in Retreat. He cut through red tape to secure resources, acknowledging an extensive network of academic partners and private donors offering support ranging from audiovisual tools to counselling.
My take-away reflection after reading his persuasive book was this: every school in the Cherry High mould needs a passionate external change catalyst such as Jansen to lead and unlock access. But to yield countrywide change, every one of us has a role to play in fixing our schools.
This review was produced by The Education Desk, an independent non-profit newsroom dedicated to addressing schooling challenges in South Africa.
