South Africa: Jonathan Jansen's Worth the Fight - - Fixing Failure in SA Schools

The renowned professor of education explores classroom transformation in his latest book.

Professor Jonathan Jansen is probably the best-known public intellectual in South Africa. His newspaper columns, books and public engagements are relevant and challenging. So, when he decides to work alongside a principal on the Cape Flats to turn around a school, people take note.

His original goal wasn't to write a book, but to work alongside the principal to turn around the academic results of a school that got the Western Cape's lowest pass rate in the 2023 National Senior Certificate examinations. However, he soon realised two things: his most cherished assumptions about teaching, learning and leading and managing working-class schools were seriously flawed, and the story about how and why change happened at this school had to be widely shared.

Jansen's experience has significant implications for the model of teacher education at public universities that prepare teachers for the profession. There is now evidence that academic teachers, long removed from the classroom, are perpetuating the inequality and ineffectiveness so prevalent in primary and high schools throughout South Africa.

"Sending professors back to school" became a major research project that flowed from these observations, and some of his colleagues have already changed the ways in which they prepare future teachers....

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