As the SA Council of Churches (SACC), we claim to be dedicated to protecting the divinely endowed human dignity of those we are called to serve, who include children.
During this central committee meeting, I would like to raise critical concerns about a practice that threatens the holistic development of our children.
I refer to the compulsory Monday-to-Monday, seven-day school attendance being imposed on our pupils, particularly those in higher grades preparing for matriculation.
What disturbs me profoundly is not merely the practice itself, but the way it has been implemented — haphazardly, without formal explanation to parents or the public, without consultation with stakeholders, and without engagement with the churches which have historically been partners in the education of our children.
I have heard the minister of basic education explain on the radio that deficiencies in the foundation phase necessitate this intensive intervention at higher grade levels.
There have also been fragmentary explanations for this seven-day school week: that political principals insist on it to ensure high matric results; that teachers receive overtime payments for weekend work; and that pupils do not study at home and therefore must be drilled at school.
This practice extends to include matric camps and the routine use of school holidays for extra lessons.
These camps often take place in schools without adequate facilities — pupils sleep in classrooms, wash in ordinary toilets with basic wash basins, raising serious safeguarding concerns.
How well are these children supervised? What protection is in place for their physical safety and dignity?
School holidays, meant for rest and family time, are now routinely commandeered for additional drilling.
Yet here is my first concern: The newly enacted Bela Act specifies the foundation phase as mandatory, but there is no concrete plan to implement it.
Instead of repairing the breach at its source, we are intensifying pressure at the upper levels.
We are treating symptoms while the disease advances.
When we attempt to engage school principals about this matter, we are met with a uniform response: “It is an order from the department of education.”
This response reveals a deeper malady in our education system — the complete bypassing of parents, the primary teachers of their children.
In principle, the primary agent of education is the parent.
The school acts in loco parentis, not as a replacement for or superior to the parents.
Education is a sacred trust delegated by parents to educational institutions, not a monopoly claimed by the state.
I acknowledge with sorrow that many parents have abdicated this responsibility, relegating the entirety of child formation to schools.
This makes them complicit in their own disempowerment.
While they murmur about Monday-to-Monday schooling, they do not voice their complaints loudly enough.
But their silence does not legitimise this usurpation. Two wrongs do not make a right.
The imposition of this practice without consultation represents a fundamental undermining of the family.
Christian anthropology teaches a fundamental truth: human beings are constituted by three inseparable dimensions — physical, intellectual, and spiritual.
True education, the kind that builds nations and forms character, demands the holistic development of all three, as neglecting one dimension inevitably damages the whole person.
Yet, we observe educational policy driven by a panic reaction to poor exam results, focusing on excessive drilling and extra camps.
This narrow focus on mere academic outcomes ignores the essential wellbeing and development of the whole child, raising serious concerns about safeguarding, rest, and critical thinking.
Ultimately, by failing to nourish the whole person — mind, body, and spirit — we educate for deficiency, denying our children the opportunity to experience life in its abundance, as Jesus tells us in John 10:10.
Now, let me briefly explain how this Monday-to-Monday schooling negatively affects each of these constitutive dimensions of being human.
Our children are exhausted. They are tired of learning. They want to do something else. This is not normal, nor is it healthy.
Children need to play as an essential component of physical development.
They need sports and physical exercise to develop healthy bodies.
Their developing bodies and minds require adequate rest and sleep.
They need time to perform household chores that develop practical life skills and physical coordination.
They need to bond with family members and friends and learn the lessons of relationships that no textbook can teach.
When we confine pupils to classrooms and desks seven days a week, we are creating physically exhausted young people.
This can lead to increased health problems.
It also leads to a generation that no longer finds joy in the appreciation of the gift of sabbath rest that God himself modelled when he created the world (Gen 2:2-3).
Education is not the pumping and coaching of subject content into young minds, nor is it drilling for examinations.
True intellectual formation develops the capacity to think, to question, to analyse, to create, to solve problems, and to engage with knowledge in ways that transform both the knower and the world.
What we are observing is, in fact, a departure from authentic intellectual growth.
Rote memorisation through repetitive drilling prepares pupils merely for exams that require regurgitating information.
This fosters a passive relationship with knowledge, where pupils become recipients rather than engaged thinkers.
Pupils may pass their matriculation examinations — and politicians may celebrate “good matric results” — but these same pupils struggle profoundly at the tertiary level.
The dropout rates at our universities bear witness to this pedagogical bankruptcy.
When these young people arrive at university, where drilling gives way to independent learning, critical thinking, and self-directed study, they collapse because they have never been taught to learn; they have only been taught to memorise and regurgitate.
When children cannot attend church because they are required at school on Sundays, we are witnessing nothing less than the systematic displacement of God from the formation of the next generation.
This is spiritual orphaning — we are raising children who are cut off from their spiritual heritage, from the community of faith, from the formation of conscience, and from the transcendent anchors that give life meaning and direction.
The churches play an indispensable role in the spiritual formation of young people.
This is not merely our assertion; it is a role we have faithfully fulfilled throughout SA’s history, including during the darkest days of colonialism and apartheid.
The first schools in this country were established by churches.
The first teachers were trained by churches.
The foundations of literacy and learning in SA were laid by missionaries and Christian teachers who understood that education must attend to the whole person — body, mind, and spirit.
Today, any religious education or practice has been stopped in our basic education schools.
There is an attitude, pervasive in public schools, that undermines and demeans religion and faith as irrelevant.
Meanwhile, our children are kept away from the churches that could provide the moral and spiritual formation our society desperately needs.
Yet, in the context of SA’s profound moral crisis — the family breakdowns, with most children coming from single-parent households; the bullying epidemic in schools; teenage pregnancy; substance abuse among youth; violence and lawlessness; gender-based violence; corruption at every level of society — the government repeatedly lambastes the churches for not playing their part.
I ask the government: How are the churches to play their part when children are kept away from the church?
The consequences of this spiritual destruction are predictable and tragic.
We are raising a generation without God, without moral anchoring, without spiritual resources, without the formation of conscience.
We are producing technically skilled individuals who lack ethical formation.
The spiritual dimension is not an optional extra; it is not a nice addition if time permits.
It is the dimension that integrates and gives meaning to all the others.
Without spiritual formation, physical health becomes mere fitness, and intellectual achievement becomes mere cleverness.
Both can be used for good or evil.
It is the spiritual dimension that forms conscience, that cultivates wisdom rather than mere knowledge, that produces not just successful people but good people.
In our manifesto, “The SA We Pray For”, the SACC committed itself to specific priorities.
Among the five pillars of its manifesto — healing and reconciliation, family fabric, poverty and inequality, economic transformation, and anchoring democracy — the SACC highlights its commitment to holistic education.
It calls for church intervention “to improve educational outcomes as a way of lifting people out of poverty and addressing inequality”.
It calls for education that develops “a positive and inquisitive mindset for knowledge and capacity for critical thinking and problem solving”.
It calls for education that provides “a safe and structured environment for self-awareness and personal growth towards a healthy confidence and positive life ambition”.
This is education that attends to the whole person — body, mind, and spirit.
This is the education our children deserve. Monday-to-Monday drilling contradicts every principle we articulated in that manifesto.
As a church, we carry more than a century of experience in education and social welfare services.
For this reason, we continue to uphold the passion for holistic, high-quality education to this day.
We have said we are willing partners in improving education.
Yet we are ignored when policy is made and then told to “play our part” in cleaning up the consequences.
The time for polite murmuring has passed. I have raised this issue with parents when I come for confirmations in my diocese, when I find children absent because they are at school on Sunday.
I have raised it with church leaders, who see the problem but do not seem sufficiently fired up to address it.
Today I challenge us all to take up this matter with urgency and determination.
First, at the national level, the SACC must formally engage with the department of basic education. We must demand:
- A clear, public explanation of the policy requiring Monday-to-Monday school attendance, matric camps, and routine use of school holidays for extra lessons;
- Evidence-based justification for this practice;
- Data on outcomes: Are these children actually performing better academically? What is happening to their holistic development? What are the university completion rates for those subjected to this drilling?
- Consultation with parents and faith communities before any such policy continues; and
- A commitment to addressing foundation phase deficiencies at their source, rather than through intensive drilling in higher grades.
Second, we must engage at the provincial level.
Provincial church councils must approach provincial education departments and demand engagement.
Third — and this is crucial — church leaders must take this matter up at the local level.
When national bodies speak, we speak at a high altitude.
However, education occurs in communities, in schools, and in the daily lives of our children.
Engage with school governing bodies that provide parents with legitimate representation and authority.
Demand that principals stop hiding behind “orders from the department” and instead advocate for the children entrusted to their care.
Fourth, we must assert the role of churches in holistic education.
The government authorities, particularly in the Eastern Cape, have sought to use the SACC to endorse their programmes and projects under the guise of “partnering,” while simultaneously implementing their preferred education policies without consulting us.
They are displacing the churches, relegating us to irrelevance in the formation and building of the nation.
We cannot accept this.
Our history speaks for itself. Education in SA was built by churches.
The best schools in this country, even today, are often affiliated with churches.
We must make it clear: There will be no genuine partnership if partnership means the government makes all decisions and then asks us to mop up the consequences.
In the short-term, we may see modest improvements in matriculation pass rates.
But these successes are illusory, purchased at too high a cost.
In the medium-term, we will see increased dropout rates at the tertiary level, as students who were drilled but never taught to learn independently fail when that support structure is removed.
We will see increased mental health problems among young people — anxiety, depression, burnout — because they have been pushed beyond healthy limits during their formative years.
In the long-term — and this is what should terrify us — we will see a generation that is physically exhausted, intellectually dependent, and spiritually empty.
They will not understand the rhythm of work and rest.
They will not know how to think for themselves.
They will have no moral compass, no sense of transcendence, no spiritual resources to draw upon in times of crisis.
Most tragically, we will have a generation that has grown up without the church, without God, without moral and spiritual formation.
And when that generation assumes leadership of our country, what kind of SA will they build?
One that reflects the values instilled in them through Monday-to-Monday schooling: achievement at any cost, results over relationships, performance over principles, and expediency over ethics.
Is this the SA we pray for? Is this the SA our martyrs died for?
Is this the SA envisioned in our hard-won constitution and our democratic dispensation? I think not. I pray not. And therefore, we must not remain silent.
Brothers and sisters, we face a kairos moment — a time pregnant with both danger and possibility.
If we remain silent, we will watch the spiritual displacement of our children accelerate.
But if we speak — if we act — we can change this trajectory.
We can reclaim the space for holistic education.
We can reassert the primacy of parents and the partnership of churches.
We can ensure our children are formed not merely as examination-passing machines, but as whole people created in the image of God — body, mind, and spirit.
We are not opposed to helping disadvantaged children.
We have committed ourselves to that cause through numerous SACC initiatives.
But we refuse to accept that the only way to help these children is to work them seven days a week and deprive them of family, rest, play, intellectual curiosity, and worship.
Seven-day-a-week schooling imprisons our children.
They are oppressed by a system that sees them only as test-takers, not as whole pep[;e with bodies that need rest, minds that need cultivation, and spirits that need formation.
They are blind to the fullness of life God intends for them — a life of physical health, intellectual vitality, and spiritual depth.
It is time to proclaim their freedom. It is time to set them free.
Edited speech of the opening address to the SA Council of Churches Central Committee by Bishop Sithembele Sipuka, Catholic bishop of Mthatha and SACC president, in Johannesburg on November 6
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.