Immigrant parents' voices on children's right to education in South African schools : connecting the disconnected

Abstract

This paper focuses on the school's protection of the right to education for immigrant learners as perceived by their parents. With its approach to the subject from the human rights-based educational perspective, this paper sought to examine immigrant parents' views on their children's right to education against their background as vulnerable and marginalised school community members. The assumption on which the study presented in this paper is based is that meaningful discussion on the right to education for immigrant learners cannot be disconnected from the challenges their parents face in educating them. Immigrant parents have their views and experiences relating to children's educational rights, which are seldom studied. Guided by this view, a qualitative approach was followed to gather data through semi-structured individual interviews held with parents of immigrant learners from four purposively selected South African township schools. The results show that immigrant parents experience enormous challenges in the education of their children in South African schools. While some of the challenges are transferred from them to their children because of non-citizenship, they attribute most of the challenges to people who teach their children, namely, teachers.