6.12 Meta-Reflexivity in Professional Practice
6.12.8 Educating the Whole Child
Figure 17 Educating the Whole Child Source: Stephen Covey et al., (1994:46-49)
‘If man thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall
whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border, then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole’ (Bohm, 1996).
Steven Harrison’s The Happy Child (2002), and Kriben Pillay’s Learning and the Illusion of Separate Things: Troublesome Knowledge and the Curriculum (2016), has extended and expanded my own understanding of an holistic worldview of the child and the curriculum in the South African context, which has enabled me to engage in a paradigm shift from a traditional orthodox reductionist approach to a contemporary holistic, systems approach.
Probably the most pioneering modern work that encapsulates the holistic development of all the domains of our ontological being is Katz’s (1955), Skills of an Effective Administrator.
Amongst the competencies, Katz lists conceptual skills as one of the requisite skills for all managers within an organisational context. Conceptual skills refer to a philosophical perspective whereby managers/leaders develop an ability to see the big picture of the organization, thus taking a systems perspective
Human relation skills encapsulate the ability to work well with other people in work and in a life context. Included here are values such as sensitivity, persuasiveness, and empathy practised at all levels of management. I have personally experienced the actions of my own supervisors who appear to lack these attributes on many occasions. I explained in a previous discussion that I was displaced from my workstation due to harassment by my supervisor at Msinga CMC in September 2006. I will further explore this subject in Chapter Seven on how entrenched mental models hinder or impede deep change in an organization.
Technical skills are very often required in order to do a job well. This involves having special knowledge about procedures, processes, and equipment. As a result, technical skills are especially important at lower levels of management, for example, at the levels of Head of Department (HODs), Deputy Principals, and the Principal. Of course, this raises concern with the current system of appointments, whereby educators are appointed or deployed to management or promotion posts on the basis of union affiliation and/or political affiliation, especially in the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education. As a consequence, as stated earlier, the Department of Basic Education has appointed a commission of inquiry chaired by Professor Volmink to investigate pervasive allegation of ‘selling’ of promotion posts particularly for district directors/ district managers, including Chief Circuit Managers and Circuit Managers.
Political skill relates to the ability to enhance one’s position, building and entrenching a power base. Above all, it requires establishing the right connections. Transformative educators engage in a process called the ‘hidden curriculum’, teaching the learner twice: content on the one hand, and morals on the other. Effective schools appear to adhere to the principle of back-to-basics in order to overcome a situation whereby the school curriculum acts as a breeding ground for social ills. For example: illiteracy, unemployment, grinding poverty, crime, violence and gangster-groups. A sustainable curriculum focuses on creating human beings who will live life to the fullest (Goodlad, 1984:45).
Jansen and Blank (2014:15) note that our dysfunctional schools/ineffective schools play a significant role in perpetuating conditions characterised by the high rate of dire poverty, gangster-violence, widespread drug abuse, illiteracy, broken homes, teenage pregnancy and other social ills. Jansen goes further to argue that this anomaly is exacerbated by wrong-headed policies that demand principals to promote/condone failing children to the next grade. At the end of 2015, principals were advised to adjust examination results by adding seven marks, particularly to cater for those learners who were perceived not to be performing well. That is to say, lesser performing learners were ‘condoned’ through ‘pass with adjustment’. To cite an example of a policy that stirred consternation among educators and school governing bodies, was a circular distributed to schools in 2013 whereby all failing learners were promoted from grade 11 to grade 12. Further, learners doing the science stream and commerce stream were compelled in March 2014 to do mathematics instead of mathematical literacy, despite the fact that certain educators appeared to be less competent to teach mathematics, particularly in grade 12. These are two classic examples of ‘wrong-headed policies’ which engage in short-term solutions within the context of crisis management; offering a quick fix when there is a public scandal, rather than responding with solid long-term solutions.
It is an open secret, that the current education system in South Africa works for about 20 per cent of our schools; the remaining 80 per cent of public schools produce conspicuously low pass rates, few university level passes and very small numbers passing in the gateway subjects of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. This situation prompted me to ask: ‘What is the core business of public schools?’ It is Drucker’s (1974:134) point of view that schools have a burden of responsibility and an obligation to focus on curriculum management as their core business.
The core business of schools is to serve children and parents as customers or consumers of the Department of Basic Education (DBE).
Public schools have to produce the best citizens and the best workers for the country. However, our current education system introduced after 27 April 1994 (that is after democratic liberation), appears seldom to produce a well-balanced citizen (Jansen and Molly 2014: 108).
What seems to be missing is what Senge et al., (2000:279) refer to as a moral endeavour, with the inculcation of values grounded in democratic principles such as honesty, fairness, respect, justice, compassion and so forth.
Rokeach as cited in Daft (2008:105), defines values as what causes a person to prefer that things be done one way rather than another way. Rokeach states, that it is values that distinguish between what is conceived to be either good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, ethical or unethical, providing a clear-cut distinction between the Terminal values and Instrumental values cited earlier in this thesis. In essence, terminal or end values are beliefs about the kind of goals or outcomes that a person considers to be above everything else the important goals to strive for in life. For example, the end values include equality, freedom, emancipation, social recognition, self-fulfilment, peace and so forth. On other hand, instrumental values are beliefs about the type of behaviour that is appropriate for reaching goals in life. For example, the instrumental values include responsibility, commitment, ambition, self-discipline, capability, forgiveness, courage, resilience, politeness and so forth. Although, everyone has both end and instrumental values, individuals tend to differ in how they order the values into priorities. In a transformative educational leadership lies a desire to change the ontological worldview on the one hand, and the epistemological worldview on the other. Values should be learned and assimilated as opposed to being uncritically inherited, for instance, from the family background, school, religion and so forth.