WeeklySA_AdminDiscipline: Crisis in South African classrooms is deeper than unruly pupils. It reflects adults who have forgotten that raising children includes teaching accountability, accepting correction and respecting authority…
By Themba Khumalo
Long before a mobile phone could turn a moment of ugliness in a classroom into entertainment for thousands of strangers, teachers and pupils shared an understanding that most people accepted without having to discuss it.
The teacher was there to teach, the pupil was there to learn, and while the relationship was not always warm or even fair, there were boundaries that neither side was supposed to cross.
A pupil could dislike a teacher, question a decision or complain about being treated unfairly. However, there was still a line between disagreement and contempt, between frustration and abuse, and between having a voice and using that voice to humiliate another human being.
That understanding has been steadily eroded, and the consequences are becoming harder to ignore.
The video from North West, in which a pupil unleashes a torrent of abuse at a teacher, is disturbing not simply because of the language used but because of what the incident reveals about the changing relationship between children and the adults responsible for educating them.
The temptation is to focus on the child, demand punishment, and move on to the next outrage on our phones. But that allows us to avoid the more uncomfortable question of how we arrived at a point where a teacher can be treated with such contempt in a classroom, and where such behaviour can be mistaken for an expression of power.
This is not an argument for bringing back the authoritarian classroom of the past. Teachers abused their positions, children were humiliated, and violence was too often dressed up as discipline. Nobody should want those days back, and nobody should confuse respect for teachers with permitting adults to mistreat children.
But we have allowed legitimate authority to become entangled with the abuses of authority that we rightly rejected. In our determination to protect children, we have sometimes become strangely reluctant to tell them that they also have responsibilities.
A child can have rights without having the right to insult, intimidate, or humiliate another person. A teacher can be held accountable for misconduct without surrendering the authority required to maintain order.
A classroom cannot function on the principle that every instruction is negotiable and every consequence is an assault on a child’s dignity.
Teaching requires an environment in which pupils can listen, concentrate, and accept that the person responsible for the lesson has the authority to establish boundaries. Without that structure, education becomes an exhausting exercise in behaviour management, with teachers spending increasing amounts of their energy trying to maintain order rather than teaching.
And we should stop pretending that teachers are indestructible people who leave their humanity at the school gate. They arrive carrying their own worries, disappointments, and private struggles, yet are expected to absorb the emotional difficulties of dozens of children while remaining patient, professional, and endlessly understanding.
They must identify behavioural problems, provide emotional support, communicate with parents, and manage conflict, while somehow finding enough energy to teach.
We have gradually turned the teacher into the person who must compensate for every weakness surrounding the child.
Schools cannot carry the moral work of the home and then be blamed when it becomes too heavy to bear.
A teacher can establish a rule, explain why it matters, and impose a reasonable consequence when that rule is broken, but the lesson is quickly undone when a child goes home to an adult who treats the school’s authority as an inconvenience to be challenged.
When that happens repeatedly, the child receives two competing messages: one says that behaviour has consequences, while the other says that consequences can be made to disappear if the right parent objects loudly enough.
That is where the relationship between home and school becomes crucial. Parents do not have to agree with every teacher or accept every disciplinary decision without question. They do, however, have to understand that undermining a teacher in front of a child is not a harmless act of parental advocacy. It weakens the very relationship on which the child’s education depends.
A parent who believes a teacher has acted unfairly should challenge the decision through the proper channels, but should still be able to tell the child that insulting or humiliating the teacher is unacceptable.
The distinction is important because children learn quickly where authority ends. If home consistently tells them that school rules are unreasonable, teachers are incompetent, and consequences are evidence of persecution, then the school is being asked to exercise authority that the home has already taught the child to disregard. No disciplinary system can survive that contradiction for long.
Good parenting is not about ensuring that a child never experiences the discomfort of being wrong. It is about preparing them to handle that discomfort without turning it into somebody else’s problem. Sometimes that means hearing your child complain about a teacher and resisting the immediate urge to take their side. Sometimes it means saying, with all the difficulty that comes with it, that the teacher was right and the child was wrong. That is not abandoning your child. It is teaching them accountability.
The home and the school do not have to agree on everything, but they cannot be competing authorities and still expect a child to learn respect.
When parents consistently reinforce reasonable boundaries and schools exercise their authority fairly, a child learns that rules are not personal attacks and correction is not humiliation. When those institutions undermine each other, the child learns something very different: that authority is negotiable, that consequences can be contested indefinitely, and that respect is owed only when it suits them.
That is not empowerment. It is a failure of preparation for adult life.
The consequences extend beyond the pupil and teacher involved in any particular incident. Every classroom disrupted by intimidation becomes a poorer place for children trying to learn. Every teacher who becomes fearful of exercising authority becomes less able to create the order that education requires.
Every parent who refuses to acknowledge a child’s wrongdoing makes it harder for a school to establish meaningful boundaries.
This is therefore much bigger than a viral video. It is about what kind of relationship we want between children and adults, and what kind of society we are creating when respect is treated as something children may demand from adults while owing very little in return.
We should want schools where children are safe from abusive adults, but also schools where teachers are safe from abusive pupils. We should expect teachers to exercise authority responsibly while giving them enough authority to teach. We should protect children’s rights while being honest enough to tell them that rights come with responsibilities.
The North West video will eventually disappear beneath the next controversy, but the conditions that produced it will remain. Unless we recover the distinction between authority and authoritarianism, between discipline and cruelty, and between a child’s rights and responsibilities, we will continue watching the same failures play out in different classrooms with different children.
The problem is not that some children have forgotten how to respect their teachers. We, as adults, have become increasingly uncertain about whether we are still entitled to ask them to.
