COLUMN ONE : Apartheid’s Sad Lesson for Pupils : In S. Africa, a ‘lost generation’ of blacks has emerged from schools starved of resources and broken by vandals. The dropout rate is near 75%. Some children are taught in chicken coops.

School spirit may be the only thing intact at Morris Isaacson High School, a cradle of South Africa’s long freedom struggle.

The dusty cluster of brick barracks, where black students led the famed 1976 Soweto uprising that launched the battle against apartheid, has few books or chalkboards. Vandals have broken most of the windows, ripped out the light fixtures and punched gaping holes in the walls and ceilings.

“Even if we don’t have windows and doors, we try,” says teacher Thabo Mohlabai. Then he points to sunlight streaming through a hole overhead. “Although on rainy days, we have a problem.”

The toilets are smashed, filthy and reeking. There are no maps, typewriters or computers. There are no soccer fields or basketballs. There was a science laboratory--but thugs destroyed it.

“We can’t do any experiments,” complains Boqatsa Shinki, the principal. “We borrow a beaker from another school and say, ‘This is a beaker.’ That’s all.”

The library was firebombed two years ago, burning the books, shelves and roof. Offices and several classrooms were torched separately. Yet the school is so overcrowded, with 1,035 pupils, teachers still use a burned-out former classroom with no roof. The students stand up, huddled under umbrellas in the blazing sun.

But Eliza Ramookgo, an 18-year-old senior, says most Soweto schools are worse.

“We have no gangsters here,” she says proudly, dressed neatly in a white blouse and black skirt. “We respect the teachers and principal. We have classes until 2. At other schools, they go home at 11 or before.”

She smiles shyly and adds, “There is no better school in Soweto!”

Black education is the hidden crisis and challenge as South Africa moves toward democratic elections in April and eventual black-majority rule. Largely overlooked in the country’s political maelstrom, one of the worst legacies of apartheid--as well as the liberation struggle that toppled it--has been the virtual collapse of what was already a miserable education system for millions of impoverished blacks.

“There’s been a breakdown in the culture of learning,” said Linda Chisholm, head of an education think tank at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. “How bad is the problem? It’s incalculable. Daunting. Devastating. Disastrous. Pick your word.”

According to Piet Marais, the national education minister, about 2 million black children--out of 10 million--never go to school. Almost three out of four who do enroll drop out to join the “lost generation” of the unskilled and unemployed. They have plenty of company: Nearly half the adult population is illiterate and jobless.

Yet there is little incentive to stay in school. Fewer than half the pupils taking final exams across the country this month are expected to pass. And the diploma has limited value: Last year, fewer than one in 10 graduates found a paying job.

“In a nutshell, schooling has completely broken down,” said Ahmed Essop, who convened the National Education Conference, a high-profile forum of educators and policy-makers. “Students don’t go to school. If they do, teachers don’t teach. There’s really no education happening, especially in urban black townships.”

Conditions are no better in rural areas. A recent study for the Commission of European Communities estimates that half of all black children drop out by fourth grade, “which is unsurprising given that half (the) primary schools are single-classroom farm schools, owned and managed by a white farmer . . . and taught by teachers likely to have virtually no secondary education themselves.”

Although apartheid is officially over, the school system it created is not: The white-ruled government still runs 18 racially segregated education departments for white, Asian, Colored and black students. And the government still spends at least four times more money for each white student than for each black.

The government plans to merge the departments into one non-racial agency next year and has promised to narrow the spending gap as well.

But no one expects sudden improvement. For one thing, white schools that once barred blacks by law apparently will be free to bar them under admission policies.

“A school community would be in a position to admit only white pupils,” Marais, the national education minister, said when he announced the policy earlier this year. “We won’t force people to integrate.”

For now, the difference between black and white schools is like night and day.

The 22,000 mostly white students at the Afrikaans-speaking University of Pretoria, for example, wander down leafy lanes and study under purple jacaranda trees. They use laptop computers in ivy-shrouded halls, cheer school teams and graduate to become lawyers, doctors and engineers.

Not far away is Mamelodi, a haze-shrouded township of half a million or so blacks in dilapidated matchbox homes. Mamelodi has 12 desperately crowded high schools and only two college-trained math and science teachers. Many other teachers are not even high school graduates. Those few students who graduate, and are lucky, attend the township campus of Vista University.

Vista, a seven-campus system, was created under apartheid to train teachers for black schools. The university’s 1,500 students in Mamelodi are all black. The administrators, deans and all but four faculty members are white. The campus, a graffiti-clad sprawl of red-brick buildings plunked on a dusty plain, has no trees, no sports facilities, no law, medical or engineering faculties.

Eugen Straeuli, a math teacher at Vista, said he has lost six weeks this year to student boycotts, teacher strikes, management lockouts and political chaos. Classes were canceled again as he spoke, with students chanting and dancing outside in a daylong rally.

“I find the only way I can carry on is to just go on day to day and not project what effect I’m having,” he said wearily.

The turmoil is worse in the lower grades. High school students began a violent series of strikes around the country in February to protest exam fees. Teachers then launched their first national strike in August to demand a pay raise. Other strikes were called to demand wages lost during the strike. Cars were burned, schools bombed and scores of people were wounded.

“At least 40% of the academic year has been lost,” said Sipho Cele, deputy director of the National Education Coordinating Committee, an umbrella group for teacher unions and student activist groups. “It’s the worst schooling year since 1976.”

The uprising at Soweto’s Morris Isaacson High School that year marked the first time that black students had taken to the streets in mass protest. Their anger was initially targeted on a rule requiring all schools to use Afrikaans, the hated language of white rule, as the medium of instruction. But police brutality sparked riots across the country, and students soon broadened their agenda.

By the mid-1980s, young militants were spearheading the anti-apartheid struggle. Using the slogan “liberation before education,” disaffected students dropped out to join the guerrilla war. Storm-trooper tactics by South African forces and an army of informers soon left thousands of students and teachers dead, in prison or in exile.

Now, as moderate black leaders like African National Congress President Nelson Mandela press for peace, reining in the young radicals has become a priority. Their frustration and militancy is heightened by the fact that many will be too young to vote in next year’s elections. It is one reason Mandela has proposed lowering the voting age from 18 to 14.

Experts say there are no simple answers to the education crisis. The nation needs 40,000 new classrooms just to accommodate children who never enrolled. And building more schools in squalid urban war zones will not solve the far tougher problems of wrenching black poverty, inadequate housing, rising crime and family breakup.

One attempt to provide at least a temporary solution is South Africa’s largest and perhaps most unusual school: the Chicken Farm.

Just south of Johannesburg, up to 10,000 children from black squatter families attend classes in a jumble of former poultry sheds and stables stuck between a highway and railroad track. It is no model school. But it works.

The Makazi Combined School, for example, has 666 registered students of all ages and is the newest school in the complex. The state refuses to provide paper, books or other supplies. There is no electricity, and the single faucet outside has gone dry.

The chicken coops have neither desks nor chairs. Some children crowd three abreast into donated metal bus seats. The rest sit on the dirt floor or perch on dusty piles of bricks. During breaks, they defecate behind bushes outside.

“When it’s raining, rain comes in,” said Margaret Motale, a first-grade teacher in a coop that, like the others, has open windows and doors--and other holes in the roof. “When it’s dusty, there’s dust. When it’s cold, we’re cold. When it’s hot, you smell the chickens. Some of the children faint.”

The pupils must buy their own books. Few can afford them, even if they were available. So Phindile Zulu holds a language textbook up to the 35 students in her coop’s dusty gloom. “This is the only book we have,” she explained.

Still, children line up to attend a private school that has no strikes, boycotts or bloodshed.

Victor Motsamai, 13, comes an hour each day from Sebokeng, a township riven by violence. “There’s no teaching there,” he said, standing up politely from his brick. “Just fighting.”

In the next class, Joseph Radebe patiently teaches trigonometry on a broken blackboard perched against a trash can. He has brought four calculators for the 20 older students to share on their bricks.

Radebe’s white shirt is ironed, his tie carefully knotted and his shoes shined. He hasn’t been paid in five months, he said, but his teaching is a labor of love.

“We must sacrifice whatever it takes--buildings, textbooks, blackboards--but at least we have a school,” he said proudly. “What can we do? Otherwise the children will just stay home. And they won’t have a future at all.”