Abstract
M.Ed.
One of the major factors influencing the learning environment in South Africa is
learners’ misconduct. Our education system still struggles to create a culture
conducive to effective teaching and learning, ill-discipline can negate intended
efforts to restore or create this culture. Andrews and Taylor (1998:1) indicate that
learners who misbehave tend to perform poorly in schools and are regularly
absent.
Like in most South African schools, educators in the Johannesburg Central
District are faced with problems in maintaining discipline which result in
ineffective teaching. Discipline in some schools including the Johannesburg
Central District is a serious problem that renders those schools ineffective as
institutions of teaching and learning (Buck, 1992:36, Wheldal, 1992:2, Charlton
and David, 1994:6). A lack of discipline in schools is enough reason for most
people to demand that education restore the moral integrity of the younger
generation. This call is a plea for education to ‘fix the kids’ but people greatly
differ about how this should be achieved (Nieuwenhuis, 2007:71). I propose
that Value Based Education will be an effective strategy in managing poor
discipline in the Johannesburg Central District.
This study investigates school principals’ perceptions and experience of Value
Based Education as a way of addressing the management of discipline in the
Johannesburg Central District. I have chosen a qualitative research design,
because it is exploratory, descriptive and contextual (Creswell, 1994:4). As a
qualitative researcher I was interested in understanding the meanings people
have constructed. An Interpretive perspective has enabled me to focus on the
school organization as a community sustained by human relationships. The
use of a predominantly subjectivist ontology and an interpretive epistemology
helped me to understand the subjective meaning of actions. Instead of treating
organizations as objects to be measured and analyzed (as oper the modernist
perspective), as a symbolic –interpretivist I have treated schools as webs of
meanings that are jointly created, appreciated and communicated (Hatch
27:20).