Worth the Fight

Jonathan Jansen goes back to school: to the Cape Flats high school next door to where he grew up. After learning that the school got the worst matric results in the Western Cape in 2023, Jansen signed up to help out. He spent two years in the principal’s office, teaching Grade 10 Physical Science and getting to the bottom of extreme pressures bearing down on teachers and pupils, for whom it was impossible to leave the trauma of broken families and violent crime at the school gate. With his characteristic warmth and insight, Jansen takes readers inside chaotic classrooms as he works alongside teachers to reverse years of decline. He exposes the complex web of low expectations, dysfunctional organisational culture and bureaucratic interference that keeps underperforming schools trapped in failure while setting in motion practical shifts that spark real change. Part memoir, part case study and part call to action, this is essential reading for parents, educators, policy makers and anyone who cares about the future of South Africa’s children. Clear-eyed and hopeful, Worth the Fight is about what it takes to turn a working-class school — and the South African education system — around.

JONATHAN JANSEN is a Distinguished Professor of education at Stellenbosch University. The eldest son of a preacher and a nurse, he grew up on the Cape Flats in a conservative evangelical church that shaped his values for good and bad. He was a biology teacher in the Cape before studies abroad, then returned to leadership in South African universities. Relieved of administration, he now does what professors are supposed to do: think. His family makes him possible and he lives for his two amazing granddaughters.