JONATHAN JANSEN: What our children have learned from Zuma's example
'Young people are not stupid. They learn their most important values through careful observation of what happens around them'
It was the late Philip Jackson who gave us the term “hidden curriculum” to describe the things children learn, inside but also outside the classroom, that are neither planned nor intended. The explicit curriculum contains official knowledge —teachers are required to teach the structure of the atom or the meanings of metaphors or the reasons for the Great Trek. But children learn much more than what is printed in the school syllabus or the government’s Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS).In a good school, children line up for classes, wait their turn during question time and compete to win one of the academic or cultural or sporting awards of the school. In this way they learn about discipline, respect and achievement. In a dysfunctional school, on the other hand, children learn, when the teacher is always late for classes and the broken window never gets fixed and the toilet is a pit latrine, that they really do not matter to the adults around them. There are scholars who...
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