28 October 2014
In the
apartheid era, it is said that Black people here in South Africa were deprived
of many opportunities by the then government, one of them included education.
What could one possibly do without knowing? There’s a saying that goes if you
know better, you do better. This applies everyday in our lives. To make a
simple example, take opening a door for instance. In order for one to do that,
they would need to know how it is opened. They wouldn’t automatically know how
to open it even though they had no experience of opening it at all, whether of
seeing it being opened in front of them or they being shown how to open it.
Some are slid-over, some are pulled and some are pushed, and usually, many
would have signs showing people how to open them. If a person is uneducated,
they wouldn’t be able to read the sign at the door denoting how they could open
it. Coming to the point, that’s exactly how important education is to people,
we basically cannot function without it. Education enables one with
capabilities, it gives them capacity to open many “doors”.
Freedom came,
South Africa became liberated, and education was now accessible to everyone,
including the Black nation. What I see happening now though is the exact
opposite of what was happening back then. People nowadays toy with education,
we do not take it seriously. This is merely because many of us now weren’t part
of the struggles that led to this freedom we have today. Just because many of
us as the youth of today are educated in a way, we don’t know then how it feels like being
uneducated, we could never know how it felt like being a black man then, we can
only imagine it.
If there’s
one thing that troubles me really, it is the level at which pupils are just
dropping out of school. Where I live there are many, and now they have turned to
alcohol and drugs, that is all they know. It bothers me so much that I wish I
could do something, anything. I suggest that the schools together with the
government find ways to motivate students to stay at school, they could do that
through making them enjoy both their academic work together with activities
they could be involved in. Schools nowadays aren’t encouraging sports, arts and
what not. At least if a person doesn’t do that well at school, they could be
motivated to do so through performing better at these extra activities. They could use both the activities and their academic record to score a place in universities that would allow them to persue their careers at either of the two or all together.
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