Professor Jansen, please, enough already!

I am at my wit’s end with Professor Jansen. What on earth did poor black children ever do to this man? Ok, here is the context to my current frustration (I have many so bear with me):  This is the article Prof. Jansen wrote in today’s edition of The Times or Timeslive, depending on what your news source is.

This is not the first of this type of article that Prof. Jansen has written and this post is not the first of my attempt to challenge the Professor’s thinking with the hope of getting him to change his mind at least once.  I have disagreed with the Professor here, challenged him here and also here. I have to do this again, because the Professor has done his thing against the black poor child, again.

In light of the previous articles that the Professor has written, specifically referring to the so-called “white working class” schools, I ask that the Professor’s column be withdrawn, that he be re-called as a columnist on the grounds that it is offensive, insulting and it incites violence. Please consider the previous posts (hyperlinked above) where I ask the Professor to stop equating black pupils with lawlessness, thuggery and moral decay. Another Professor decried similar generalisations by saying: Islam does not beat women, Muslim men do. It is not that Professor Jansen does not get it, he gets it just fine. He wants to be offensive and insulting and for that reason, he should be denied the platform to do so. Like David Bullard, he must go and finance his own platform where he can continue to be offensive and insulting at his own cost.

Once again, like he has done on more than two separate occassions (that I know of), Professor Jansen insists that when black pupils (read poor black people - why else will rich black parents send their children to working class white schools?) are enrolled at a white school, they come with ill-discipline. In his own words: The white children had long left as black children dominated enrolments. The black youth coming to this school were those who routinely failed inside the township schools of Soweto and surrounds, or were pushed out because of their violent and disruptive behaviour.

The Professor could not be further from the truth. The black children who are enrolled in the schools that the Professor feels so deeply for, are those whose parents are trying to get out of the misery that is the township schools. The schools that the Professor describe in the very article where gun shots ring around the school or across the school playground. These are the schools in the areas of our country that Rev. Skosana describe as hell on earth. The schools that cannot expel the worst of pupils. These are the schools that the department of education in Gauteng tried to secure some years ago and bore the wrath of Julius Malema’s Cosas. The Professor will of course remember that famous and destructive march through the streets of Gauteng by Cosas, then led by Julius Malema. The Professor will remember that a child had been attacked at school, dragged off to a nearby open veld, killed and his body set alight. Enclosing the schools and insisting that the school gates be locked during school hours, was the Gauteng education department’s response to this gruesome event. An event many poor black parents seek to protect their children from by sending them to the very schools the Professor feels so deeply for.

The white children are removed from these schools for other reasons Prof. The discipline in these schools slip for other reasons Prof. The system fails these schools. Like the formerly Afrikaans universities fail black students who get attacked in the middle of the night. Attacks that are so violent that some end up in hospital. Like your university failed poor working mothers when they were humiliated by the white students you feel so deeply for. During my days at university I watched with amazement how lecturers avoided disciplining black students and then complaining among themselves about the lack of discipline among the students. It is lack of leadership, lack of courage for one’s convictions and not poor black children that is responsible for the decay that you feel so deeply about Prof.

The Professor feels for the school principal who visciously assaults a child. He says that’s the consequence of a violent society. This is a lot worse than one adult threatening violence of yesteryear on another adult, violence he is unlikely to carry out. The latter has the whole media fraternety feeling for her.

Dear Professor: I feel for the children who are beaten. I feel for the children who are blamed for their blackness and their poverty and for all that is bad.

I ask for leadership, I ask for courage, I ask for your column to be discontinued.