WORTH THE FIGHT, fixing failure in South African schools

224pp., illus., paperback, Jonathan Ball, Cape Town, 2026

ISBN: 9781776196104

Part memoir, part case study and part call to action, Worth the Fight details the two years Professor Jonathan Jansen spent working alongside teachers in a struggling Cape Flats high school next door to where he grew up, to try and reverse years of decline

After learning that the school got the worst matric results in the Western Cape in 2023, Jansen spent two years in the principal’s office, teaching Grade 10 Physical Science and coming to understand the pressures bearing down on teachers and pupils.

 He exposes the complex web of low expectations, dysfunctional organisational culture and bureaucratic interference that keeps underperforming schools trapped in failure, poits out that academic failure cannot be separated from outside realities like poverty, violent crime, and family trauma, and argues that leadership team quality matters more than seniority, deliberate strategy is vital, and schools must build working relationships with education departments, alumni and parents.

Jonathan Jansen is currently Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education at the Stellenbosch University. His many books include Corrupted, a study of chronic dysfunction in South African universities; As By Fire, the end of the South African university; co-author (with Cyrill Walters) of The Decolonisation of Knowledge, radical ideas and the shaping of institutions in South Africa and beyond and editor of Decolonisation in Universities: The politics of curriculum.