The only extent of the state’s concern with gender is in the teaching of biology, and in that, schools may be designated as “boys” or “girls” schools, such as Durban Girls High or Grosvenor Boys High. Beyond that, the issue of gender is none of the state’s business.

Yet gender discrimination is being controversially promoted in American schools amidst great opposition from parents. Little children are being confronted with questions about their gender that unnecessarily promotes confusion and psychological trauma. The agenda of the promoters of this ungodly, warped ideology is the destruction of traditional norms and values and the violation of God’s law, as stated in Genesis 1:27, that he created male and female in his image.

There can be no “misconception” of the ultimate purpose of the DBE’s Gender Responsive Pedagogy Toolkit. It is to contrive an issue where one does not exist because the process of self-discovery evolves naturally. But through intrusion and interference in that process, the agenda of the globalists in the DBE is the incremental subsuming of parental rights and cultural values by the state.

The fact that the “toolkit” prescribes “visual aids free from stereotypical depictions of gender roles” and toilet facilities that correspond with a child’s perception of their gender identity, shows exactly where this subversive, wokeist ideology is headed: the creation of a new gender called transgenderism.

Instead of being wooed by-election slogans, voters should be discerning the stance of the party of their choice on the issue of state intrusion and ideology concerning so-called gender guidance in schools.

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The Parents Bill of Rights legislation HR5 passed by the Republicans in the House of Representatives strengthens the voice of parents in their children’s education. It does so by giving parents the right to oversee budgets and spending in schools; the right to attend school board meetings and be heard; the right to know what is being taught in schools and what materials are being used.

But the so-called Democrat party has rejected this Bill as “Orwellian” and “Fascist,” thereby demonstrating that the Democrat party is the proxy of the totalitarian globalists who reject national sovereignty and the US constitution. Their attitude expresses exactly why Trump has pledged to remove control of government from the Deep State treasonists and return it to the people.

By calling parents “domestic terrorists” because they  object to Critical Race Theory,  transgender ideology in their children’s education and the sanctioning of pornography in school libraries, of which Jill Biden approves, it is clear America has lost its moral compass.

Not surprisingly a recent survey showed that 20% of Americans favour a national divorce of states from the un-American policies of the Democrat Biden regime.

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In the first place, are these volunteers going to be armed?  Are they going to sit in on lessons or roam around corridors while teaching is going on? Will they be permitted to intervene in a teacher’s confrontation with a recalcitrant pupil? Will the remuneration of these volunteers be by the province or individual schools seeing as this master plan is part of a scheme to tackle unemployment?

As for safe school committees, like CPFs, one is looking at just another talk shop forum which generates meetings and minutes in a revolving-door fashion. Such advisory bodies are neither hands-on nor proactive and cannot contribute physically is actually intervening in an incident of violence.

The only way to deal with school violence is by rigorous application of school discipline. Besides the usual compiling of letters of warning and disciplinary hearings on a pupil’s file, repeated defiance and non-co-operation has to lead to expulsion which, in any case, should be immediate in cases of violence or repeated threats of violent intimidation.

Unfortunately, the professionalism of teachers has been eroded to the point where they have long since ceased to be kings and queens of their classrooms. Along with the politics of school governing bodies and the tardiness of district superintendents in promptly authorising the expulsion of refractory elements from schools, teachers and teaching have become a hostage to a multitude of factors outside of the school building.

Without the strict application of uniformity, conformity and professionalism, control in schools have been usurped by outside sources. The KZN government’s crackpot plan for school safety is a case in point.

Sent into The Mercury and published, 10 July 2019.

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Tertiary education is not an unqualified right. The halls of higher learning are not the place for hooligans and arsonists. Having a degree is no guarantee of a job or of a particular lifestyle. Yet the seeds of such expectations have been politically sown and are now fomenting violence and anarchy.

The root cause of all that is wrong in this country is excessive tolerance. Perpetrators are seldom punished for their wrongdoing. The result is that an ‘anything goes’ culture has evolved which is headed in one direction – anarchy.

The situation calls for draconian action to salvage appreciation for the culture of learning on our campuses.

Sent into The Witness and published,  10 February 2019.

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Since History embraces all branches of knowledge and experience, its inclusion in a fully rounded education package should be automatic. But what has hurt the subject going back more than a century is the content focus that has prevailed: political, ideological and military.

While, of course, the reigns of rulers, the causes and effects of wars and the making of empires are necessary to provide context, such material does not necessarily appeal to the average student. There are numerous other themes that should form a syllabus focus such as health and medicine, exploration, transport, literary and musical, humanitarianism, industrial development, environment, flight, electricity, trade and construction.

As has been pointed out, the content of a new South African History for high school would have to go beyond 1994. But there lies the difficulty: if such a package focuses purely on the political, it will degenerate into propaganda and be viewed as nothing more than a political prop for those in power.

Thus, an important challenge in shaping a new history syllabus is to ensure a wide focus of themes which educate the learner as to the extent of and challenges to progress in fields such as transport, infrastructure, industry, health, environment and education, albeit within the context of the political framework that prevailed before 1994.

The other challenge would be to examine how much of what was achieved before 1994 was allowed to deteriorate and decline along with greatly reduced safety and security and greater inequality. Such a History syllabus would prove instructive and serve as a touchstone for the next generation.

Mid-South Coast Mail Scottburgh

Sent into The Daily News and published, 14 June 2018.

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Not only is the infrastructure of the school broken in terms of toilets, doors, windows and lights but vandalism is rife. Added to that, those who call themselves teachers are failing to lead by example in terms of punctuality, enforcement of dress code and etiquette. Instead, their union meetings take precedence over school attendance. Their apparent indifference has resulted in learners absconding, gambling, selling cigarettes and dagga.

A deplorable state of affairs indeed but sadly one that is encroaching on schools countrywide and which has manifested itself at tertiary level. So-called students who trash libraries and facilities on university campuses and technikons and, for the most part, get away with it, are setting the tone and the parameters of the future of this country.

What kind of society will prevail when their generation has grown up? What kind of offspring will they bring into the world given their own anarchic conduct?

As a retired teacher, there is no former colleague I know who would go back to teaching in a state school for any price. Worse still, of the younger teachers I know, most are disillusioned with teaching and its prospects.

The sad shambles of Mariannridge school portends South Africa’s future.

No wonder emigration just keeps accelerating.

Sent into The Daily News and published, 13 April 2018.

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Khuzwayo argues that teachers have no right to “disrespect” what a particular culture upholds and adduces hair length as an example. Negotiation and compromise on an individual basis, Khuzwayo asserts, should be the way to handle cultural differences.

Obviously, some leeway has to be provided where critical religious obligations may apply. But essentially school discipline is premised on uniformity and conformity. One cannot condone dreadlocks for one pupil and prescribe short back and sides for another.

All properly established schools have school rules and an ethos to uphold. If an applicant for enrollment finds that he or she cannot abide by a school’s code of conduct, then that applicant should move on and find a school that is compatible or compliant with his or her culture.

Excessive democratisation and liberalisation in schools has undermined and, in many cases, crippled disciplinary parameters. Conformity and uniformity in the formative years of life is necessary in producing order in society. The reason there is social malaise and meltdown nowadays is because discipline has been eroded and neglected in homes. The products of those “homes” and their “anything goes” attitudes then expect toleration and latitude in schools.

Unless pupils respect and accept the conformity and uniformity that should underpin school discipline, schools can toss their codes of conduct in the bin.

Sent into The Mercury and published,  25 November 2017.

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The blunt reality is that education has become a casualty of excessive democratisation.

Teachers are no longer the kings and queens of their classrooms. Indeed their professionalism has been eroded to the point of virtual extinction by bureaucracy and politicisation. It’s a case of too many cooks have spoilt the broth.

Here’s what’s wrong and how to fix it:

1. School appointments and promotions should be purely by educational authorities which are staffed by professionally qualified personnel. No union lobbying. No parent body involvement/ interference.
2. Schools are for children – not adults. No enrolment of learners over the age of 19.
3. Repetitive insubordination by a learner should be addressed by the District Superintendent and Principal and the culprit told that should he fail to reform he will be expelled.
4. Violence against teachers involving weapons: immediate expulsion. No suspensions, probations or appeals. Firm, non-negotiable boundaries and deterrents are the only way to restore order, safety and sanity in schools.
5. Corporal punishment: to be re-established as part of school discipline and to be applied only by the Principal or his Deputy. Letters of Warning and paperwork have no deterrent effect. The realisation that misdemeanours will result in a caning worked in the past and ensured that discipline and order prevailed.
6. Teachers to be in classrooms and not at union meetings during school hours.
7. Parent bodies: to confine their activities to fund-raising, buildings and grounds maintenance, newsletters and magazines. Objections and concerns about educators to be directed to the Education Dept. and/or the provincial parliamentary education portfolio.

Professionalism has to be restored in schools which have to be seen as establishments of learning and the inculcation of sound social values, respect and decorum. Vandalism, violence, thuggery, intimidation and insubordination which have been allowed to fester through liberal tolerance and excessive democratisation, have to be prohibited.

Going to school and receiving an education needs to be seen as an uplifting, scholarly process that has to be respected and jealously guarded. Those who refuse to conform or comply and who jeopardise that process have to be decisively dealt with.

Of course, howls of dismay and opposition no doubt will greet the above. But, having spent 34 years in high schools watching a once sound system implode, the only way out of the mess is to apply what used to work.

Sent into The Daily News, 22 September 2017.

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Lehohla stated that in the 1980s for every successful black tertiary student, there were 1,2 successful white students. But instead of that ratio improving after 22 years of ANC rule, Lehohla has found that the black tertiary pass rate has declined statistically to one successful black student for every six successful white students.

In accounting for this dismal state of affairs, Lehohla blames apartheid and the Bantu Education Act introduced by Dr Verwoerd in 1959. For an official who otherwise is quite competent as a statistician, such reasoning is laughable. For if the education blacks received under apartheid was so inferior, how does he explain that their university pass rate was way better under apartheid than it is now since liberation?

The poor tertiary success rate of students of all races is the result of the ANC government’s meddling in education curricula. In place of the system they inherited in 1994, they substituted multiple failed versions of Outcomes-Based Education (OBE), packaged off good teachers, closed teachers’ training colleges and amalgamated certain university campuses.

That is the legacy which is now bearing spoiled fruit. Apartheid has nothing to do with it.

Besides, the majority of students at university now were born since 1994.

Published in The Daily News

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The affliction to which I refer is political correctness, known more commonly and practically as “spin.” It’s a process that promotes convergent thinking and shepherds it, as Pound would say, into the confines of a large room. There the only distinctions in expression are those of tone and volume. Nonetheless, those differences are hailed as representing variety and diversity when in reality they propagate the same message.

In time political correctness becomes a straitjacket that marginalises and suffocates divergent and alternative thoughts and views. In time political correctness becomes holy writ. Questioning it or daring to criticise it is viewed as heresy punishable by alienation, exile, imprisonment and even death. Tyranny is its ultimate harvest.

It’s a slow, subtle process that embraces guises such as nation-building, transformation and materialism as vehicles of advancement. It preys on the unsuspecting and the uncritical. It may be generous in rewarding compliance and scathing in exposing and opposing those who attempt to evade its designs. In time its work resembles a series of electrified fences erected in the realm of public debate that shepherd thinking in a pre-ordained direction.

In South Africa this process is quite well-established. It progress is facilitated by a willingness to accept that the wrongs of the past must be rectified. BEE-compliant, for example, has become a standard term in the business lexicon. Criticisms of an obscenely affluent nouveaux riche are muted despite the fact that their accumulation of wealth in a decade has eclipsed what figures like Raymond Ackerman took a  lifetime to earn.

Dereliction of duty, corruption and plain incompetence is waived as the learning curve of the previously disadvantaged whilst criticisms are scorned as the work of those who are out of step with the programme of transformation. The privilege of serving in office is confused with the right to rule. The line between state and party interests is blurred as the creed of political correctness substitutes ideological criteria and objectives for those of good governance.

It all begs the question: from what was South Africa liberated? The short answer is – the ideology of baasskap. To unpack that slightly means that South Africa was liberated from a regime in which policy was dictated by a tiny elite. In its place a broad-based, democratic, transparent and accountable system has, ostensibly, been installed. Yet it would seem that the more things change, the more they stay the same. After all, isn’t the SABC as supine and sycophantic in its observation of political correctness as it was before 1994, even though it is supposed to be a public broadcaster?

But, before déjà vu sets in and you feel this is another Witness column[1] allow me to go back in time to 1898 and to consider the role of the media in shepherding opinion against the Transvaal. (Bear with me, a little, those of you who are not students of history).

Kruger’s Republic had become the world’s top gold producer, a fact that did not sit comfortably with the lords of the British Empire. Political control had to be wrested from Kruger. The position of the voteless  uitlanders was to be exploited with a view to creating a crisis that would lead to war. On December 18, 1898, the Commander in Chief of British forces in South Africa, Sir William Butler, sent a despatch to the Colonial Secretary in London stating that the alleged grievances of the uitlanders in the Transvaal were a fraudulent invention. “All political questions and information coming out of Cape Town are being worked by a syndicate for the spread of false information,” he wrote. In a subsequent cable Butler asserted that news concerning the Kruger government was “a prepared business.” This, as the historian Thomas Pakenham has written, would enable Sir Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner in Southern Africa, to justify war against the Transvaal.

Pakenham’s study provides an object lesson of the power of politically correct thinking in shaping and swaying public opinion. As a result of a barrage of inflammatory editorials and news reports, London’s Fleet St press as well as the Cape Times in South Africa succeeded in persuading even senior British decision-makers that war against the Boer Republic was unavoidable. “If Mr Kruger wants war, then war he must have,” declared the Daily Telegraph.

Butler’s lone voice of dissent against the subversion of peace was ignored and he was removed from his post. Based on the manner in which information was manufactured, distorted then sanctioned and promoted, the Anglo-Boer War should never have occurred.

In the 1930s the power of politically correct opinion kept Churchill’s voice in the background as he warned of the dangers of placating the Nazi threat. Even in 1946 when he warned against the communist iron curtain that was descending across Europe, the politically correct voices of the Establishment, on both sides of the Atlantic, spurned his view. Of course, events subsequently vindicated Churchill’s vision. Nonetheless, one can only speculate on how differently history might have turned out had the blanket of political correctness been breached earlier.

How, then does one deal with the enveloping threat of political correctness?

In April this year [2007] I met that very brave and persistent witness to the truth of Zimbabwe’s plight, Cathy Buckle, author of African Tears, and asked her that question. Her response was to draw two columns on a piece of paper – one headed DO’s the other DON’Ts. Under the DO’s column, she wrote: unite, complain, expose, speak out, take legal action, from alliances,, collect funds for legal challenges, be involved in civil society, be continuously proactive.

Under the DON’T’s column she listed: isolation, separation, silence, going into a laager, apathy, allowing rulers to exceed their terms.

A question often asked is whether this country will follow the same path as Zimbabwe. I addressed that in my column in The Witness  on April 27. The answer was a qualified NO premised, inter alia, on the extent to which divergent opinions are tolerated and freely propagated, the maintenance of the independence of the courts and an end to state attempts at interference in civil society through social engineering.

The way in which totalitarians entrenched themselves in power in Russia and Germany in the last century was the result of intimidation of those with contrary views and their eventual silencing. Once the flow of information was controlled, opposition was marginalised and intimidated to the point where it either disbanded or was simply declared illegal and incarcerated or shot.

In this context it is appropriate to recall the words of that brave German, Pastor Niemoller, who spent nine years in Nazi concentration camps and survived:

First they came for the Jews. I was silent. I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists. I was silent. I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists. I was silent. I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me. There was no one left to speak for me.

The point here, as Cathy Buckle has emphasised, is that unless solidarity is shown with those parts of civil society that are threatened, those bent on aggrandising their power base can do so piecemeal, secure in the knowledge that with a kind of domino theory at work, a landslide takeover is theirs.

This is the case in Zimbabwe where every single organ of civil society, except certain churches, is controlled by Zanu-PF. Hence the expression that everything is “political.” When a single authority has been permitted the wholesale takeover of society, it is obvious that any repercussion or criticism will be seen as constituting political action. Here one recalls an example cited in that column of April 27. A baker in Marondera was instructed by Mugabe’s agents to dismiss six of his workers because they were members of the opposition MDC or face closure  of his bakery. When the baker retorted that he ran a non-political bakery, he was told that employing MDC supporters made his bakery “political.” Totalitarians do not tolerate what they perceive as threats to their power base and therefore resort to violence to enforce their rule.

But it is not enough to content oneself that because opinions critical of the government are aired and publicised, all is well. The process by which the blanket of political correctness is spread is often insidious. The actions of the Judicial Services Commission this past month have given rise to considerable disquiet. Despite the shocking admission by judge John Hlophe that he had been paid by an outside investment company on a monthly basis and that he had used his judicial authority to permit that company to sue one of his junior colleagues, the JSC saw fit to let him off with a mild warning. This, of course, is outrageous. He is not fit to be a judge as eminent legal figures like retired Judge Johan Kriegler have declared. An editorial in the Mercury (October 8) stated: “The JSC has failed the administration of justice, failed the Constitution and failed the people of this country.”

It is not widely known that the president appoints 15 of the 23 members of the JSC – 16, if one includes the minister of justice. That places the objectivity and impartiality of the JSC at risk and leads to the sort of conclusions that the Black Lawyers Association has drawn: given the constitutional status of the JSC, its findings are beyond reproach, regardless of the facts of the Hlophe case.

If political correctness is allowed to seep into the judiciary in this fashion, it is just a matter of time before the same culture infests other structures.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once stated: “The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in government is to live under the government of worse men.” Criticism and the health of society are inseparable – the one is the gauge of the other. The more vigorous, penetrating and fearless the criticism a nation can stand, the healthier and stronger it will be. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

A huge responsibility, therefore, rests on you, the younger generation, to be aware of the need to preserve the free flow of information and opinions and to be wary of disinformation. Remember it was Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, a master of his craft, who said the bigger the lie the more chance of it being believed. In our time that means the louder and larger the messages purveyed by the mass media, the more careful we should be in heeding them.

Watch out for a spin in every field – not just politics. It’s churning away in all big issues – climate change, the health industry, business, sport.

Watch out too for materialism. It buys off or neutralises dissenters and detractors. “Every man has his price,” noted Cecil Rhodes. Juxtaposed with that is Thomas Jefferson’s warning that “material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.”

Chase down the truth, as Ezra Pound exhorted. Henry Ford is scorned for having reportedly stated, “History is bunk.” But what he actually said was: “History, as it is written, is bunk.” There’s a world’s difference.

Gather your own source material. I have dated and referenced cuttings on Africa and South Africa going back 30 years. With the internet, it’s even easier to access material and to store it.

Read widely. Shopping for books has never been easier using online facilities.

Believe in yourself. Question and interrogate the facts. Develop independent thinking. When I was a second-year student at university studying history, we were required to produce written critiques of at least one page in length of the essay under review at a seminar. I made the effort, and it has become a habit and a routine in managing information.

Make your own waves and surf them accordingly. Speak out. It is simultaneously your right and responsibility. The opinion not aired or shared influences nobody. The opportunities to do so have never been easier and more effective.

FINALLY, a classic piece of philosophy that demolishes political correctness: the words of Felix Schelling, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania a century ago: “True education makes for inequality; the inequality of the individual; the inequality of success; the inequality of talent, of genius. For inequality, not mediocrity, not standardisation, is the measure of the progress of the world.”

[1] Between July 1992 and November 2007, I had a fortnightly column in The Witness.

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