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Teachers are praised for their dedication

GREAT South African Teachers celebrates the massive contribution of remarkable teachers working in South African schools, past and present.

The stories, contributed by more than 100 South Africans in response to an advertisement placed in the Sunday Times and Sowetan pay tribute to the teachers who changed people's lives.

These individuals view education as a collective and creative enterprise requiring collaboration and exchange at every stage. They agree with Paul Freire's statement that "to teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities of the production or construction of knowledge".

Part of that process is the ability to humble oneself and to simply listen.

This was the process of taming the ego and excessive individualism as an obstacle to social change.

A quote from Freire's book, Pedagogy of Freedom, reads: "The important silence in the context of communication is fundamental. It is intolerable to see teachers who give themselves the right to behave as if they own the truth. The democratic-minded teacher who learns to speak by listening is interrupted by the intermittent silence of his or her own capacity to listen, waiting for that voice that may desire to speak from the depths of its own silent listening."

In the introduction of the book Jonathan Jansen, with Nangamso Koza and Lihlumelo Toya, write the following: "We ourselves have contributed to the popular and academic literature on the subject. But there is another face of education crisis; it is the face of heroes, of those teachers who struggle against great odds to give their children a fair chance of obtaining good results in subjects and in society.

"These teachers are overshadowed and, we suspect, often disheartened by accounts of drunken teachers, violence in schools, pregnant schoolgirls, high failure rates, and the endless cycle of teacher's strikes."

The contributions reflect the full range of South African schools-rich, poor, white, black, schools under apartheid, schools urban and rural, schools past and present.

There is one tribute to Richard Dudley of Livingston High School, Claremont, Cape Town, from Grant Farred that reads: "The only gift worthy of the name gift is that which does not expect reciprocation.

"The gift is an act in which we present something to another, that which we give without expectation. That is how RO Dudley conducted himself: he gave that most precious of gifts as a teacher, himself, and he expected nothing."

Dick Parker in his tribute to Ben Kies of Trafalgar High School Cape Town wrote: "Kies was admired as a teacher with a concern for people, which made him a highly contentious figure.

"At one point in 1948, a cabinet minister denounced him as a 'callow youth'. In contrast, an evangelical priest, in an inspiring sermon, compared him to the biblical Esther, 'born for just such a time as this'."

Jonathan Jansen is the principal of the University of Free State. Nangamso Koza and Lihlumelo Toyana are journalism students at the university They say that working on this book with Jansen has changed their lives.

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