This week, the Gauteng Department of Education forbade Parktown Boys' High headmaster Tom Clarke from speaking to the media.
But a senior teacher at the school, speaking to the Saturday Star on condition of anonymity, said discipline at South African schools had become a crisis.
"The advent of a liberal democracy removed discipline from the headmaster and placed it in the hands of parents, who are not qualified to administer it."
In its place, he said, had come an incredibly bureaucratic process full of delays and run by people who had no clue what they were doing.
"It has become impossible to administer discipline," he said. "Discipline must be immediate if it's to be effective."
Cathy Callaghan, the Governors' Alliance secretary, an association of school governing bodies (SGBs), denies this. "What happened (at Parktown Boys') was not discipline, it was common assault. The law is clear on this, the Schools Act is clear on this. Children disciplining other children is not acceptable."
She also scoffed at the claim that school governing bodies were impotent. "SGBs have authority … to act immediately and suspend guilty parties for five days where there is a breach of the code of conduct or where a crime has been committed.
"On conclusion of the disciplinary hearing, there were a variety of sanctions," she said, "including not just expulsion, but also lesser sanctions that would have to be coupled to anger-management and behavioural programmes that would be mandatory for offenders to attend."
Pene Kimber claimed this week that matrics were running the school with the connivance of the teachers, something her son stated in his affidavit to the police, concerning the events of February 2.
Other parents have claimed Parktown turns a blind eye to corporal punishment, something that was outlawed by the Schools Act.
Professor Mary Metcalfe, head of the Wits School of Education and a former Gauteng education MEC, said a survey of incidents of school violence across the country showed a significant proportion of pupil-on- pupil violence "occurred in unsupervised space or where learners are given authority over other learners that is inappropriate".
"The responsibility for the educational content and tone of the disciplinary ethos of the school belongs with the professional staff. If corporal punishment is continuing at Parktown Boys', it's illegal and educationally unsound," Metcalfe said.
Education specialist Professor Jonathan Jansen, who is in Durban sorting out the chaos at the Mangosuthu University of Technology, said initiation remained a common feature of boarding schools and universities, and was a practice that was hard to change without the will of the school's management and teachers.
"Most abuse remains under cover as a result of the secrecy that governs these practices. One of the main reasons these practices persist is the cultural ambivalence towards initiation in residences. Generations lived through these practices, and with few exceptions, alumni recall initiation as a positive experience that facilitated their induction and socialisation into the residence experience.
"There is, in a perverse sense, a loyalty to residence and residence culture that tolerates bad behaviour. Any attempt, therefore, to change such deeply rooted cultural practices will not be easy."
Druce Hall parents' committee chair Marc McLean echoed this.
"My son's not talking to me for the decision I made to suspend all 12 matrics and strip the Druce head boy of his badge. With all the press coverage, he and the other boys have been saying 'Why are they destroying our home'. That's what it's like in a boys' hostel school.
"It's an indescribable passion to belong to an incredibly proud school with great traditions, and it is tough and the initiation did get out of hand, but you show me one headmaster of a boys' school in this country who can put his hand on the Bible and say initiation isn't going on in his school," McLean said.
A former deputy headmaster, who has known Clarke for years, said: "What saddens me is that all the good that someone like Tom Clarke has done for his entire career has been forgotten in an instant, and you'll find 5 000 people who'll stand up and say the same."
Clarke is due to retire in March 2010. - Kevin Ritchie
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