The recent attack on a teacher at Glenvista High is just the latest indication that our schools are microcosms of the broader society in which they exist. The message we should be receiving loud and clear is that we are a society that is prone to respond to problems with violence-and that this "strategy" impairs our performance as individuals and as a nation.

Professor Deon Rossouw, CEO of the Ethics Institute of South Africa (EthicsSA) argues that schools hold a mirror up to society and can thus become enablers of a dysfunctional society by producing individuals who conform to its norms.

"The good news is that schools can also act as catalysts for a new type of society. A school that is built on strong ethical foundations will create an environment that is safe for pupils and teachers-and academic performance will improve as a result," Professor Rossouw says. "Over the longer term, such schools will play a role in changing society because their success will cause others to emulate them, and their alumni will take that ethical ethos into their adult lives."

On the question of academic performance, Professor Rossouw points out that South Africa's consistently poor rankings internationally are shocking because they are not the result of a lack of funding. Education is one the major items on the national budget, accounting for 18 percent of government's planned expenditure and yet only half of the pupils that enter the system at grade 1 complete grade 12, and levels of literacy and numeracy among pupils remain dismally low. South Africa's primary education was rated 132 out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report 2012-13, trailing countries like Malawi, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and El Salvador.

"The causes for our lack of performance are pretty well known; they include teacher apathy, lack of discipline, non-delivery of text books, inappropriate union activity, lack of teaching skills. The list is long, but it's less well known that the lack of ethical standards is also a contributing factor," says Professor Rossouw.

"There's no question: dysfunctional schools produce poor academic performance," Professor Rossouw observes. "On the flipside, it's worth noting that schools are turned around when a new leader is successful in introducing a set of shared values. Only when all members of the school community-parents, teachers and learners-accept responsibility for those values do you get a functioning school that is able to produce high-quality graduates. Ethics and academic performance, in fact, are quite strongly linked."

The solution, however, is not simply to add ethics to school curricula.

Ethics need to be lived rather than taught, otherwise it will simply be seen as a purely academic exercise, of no relevance to real life. Everyone in the school community has to buy into its ethical values-the governing body, the staff, the parents and the pupils. All these constituencies have to be involved in identifying the values; equally, all must be involved in rewarding those that exemplify them and censuring those that do not.

Such an approach will help create functional schools where pupils and teachers have respect for each other and for learning, and thus will produce better results. Such schools will also contribute to creating a more ethical-and thus more functional-society.

"Better academic performance is one important by-product of functional schools built on shared values. Perhaps as important, such institutions will also produce better citizens, something our society needs if we are to turn back the tide of corruption and violence" Professor Rossouw says. "For that reason, EthicsSA proposes to launch a pilot 'Schools as moral communities' project in five schools over a two-year period."