Undiagnosed post-conflict trauma is a root cause of problems in South African schools

Watching scenes of adults running with injured children in their arms in Gaza hospitals night after night is terrible. There is a danger that we will become desensitised to this tragedy.

“All wars, whether just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child.” Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of Save the Children, uttered these words almost 100 years ago.

Standing up for children who were starving in Germany and Austria because of a blockade imposed by the Allies in the aftermath of World War  1, Jebb challenged powerful governments, including her own in the UK, and started a global movement for protecting children in conflict.

Today in Gaza and in many other parts of the world, children are subjected to unimaginable suffering. They are killed, injured, maimed and raped. They are bombed in their schools and in their homes.

The war in Gaza reminds us that children also suffer the indirect consequences of conflict. Save the Children notes that children living in conflict-affected settings are likely to be out of school or have no access to basic sanitation and clean water, and are more likely to die in childhood because of undernutrition and a lack of medical care.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War

It points out that high levels of toxic stress in children who have lived in or fled from war zones can have a lifelong impact on their mental health and development.

The apocalyptic situation in Gaza and the horrific impact of the bombing of people got me thinking about an article written by Dr Martin Prew more than 10 years ago.

In Gaza they cannot even think of schooling or reconstruction before the implementation of a ceasefire. Getting schools going after this destruction and ongoing trauma will take many years.

Our schools deal with a fraction of the trauma in Gaza, but this still needs to be considered. Prew uses the lens of post-conflict trauma to explain why so many of our schools still perform so badly, by international standards.

He notes that opinionated and confident education professionals also struggle to explain why most of South Africa’s schools still perform badly.

He maps the phases we have gone through: Blaming teachers, apartheid, principals, provincial education departments and parents, and acknowledges that “much of the problem can be explained within the context of apartheid, which left South Africa with a deeply divided education system”.

Prew turns to a World Bank education specialist, Peter Buckland, who says in his study of post-conflict schools, “Reshaping the Future”: “Most of the major challenges confronting the post-conflict reconstruction of education systems are the same as those confronting any effort at system reform.”

Prew explores what the roots of the ­trauma might be in South Africa and observes that rural schools and former homeland school communities were deeply traumatised by forcible relocation and dispossession of all or most of their resources and wealth.

South Africans experienced the loss of land, wealth and respect, and families ended up crowded together with little privacy and few resources. He also notes that South African schools were exposed to varying but often high levels of conflict during the 1980s and early 1990s – and, I would add, 1970s.

South African schools were exposed to varying but often high levels of conflict during the 1980s and early 1990s. (Photo: Brenton Geach)

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