How old are our oldest schools, really?

 

It appears, from something I saw on Facebook, that Muir College is celebrating its 200^th anniversary this year. It will be the first South African school to do so which, obviously, makes it the oldest school in the land.

In my days as a teacher and rugby coach I visited Muir twice, once at the old school with its quaint pavilion, in Park Avenue in the middle of Uitenhage, and once at its new site up on the hill. I remember being awed by the sense of history and tradition about the place and by the generous hospitality we received.

Muir is unquestionably one of our finest schools. Whether it really is our oldest is, however, open to discussion. The Facebook post I saw included this graphic, listing the oldest 30 schools in South Africa. There are red flags all over it.

 

The age of an institution is tied to its establishment date and that is usually where things become unclear. It’s an area that I have researched quite a lot and written about from time to time. Many organisations began as something else and they can draw a clear line of succession from where they came from to where they are now. I decided, for my purposes, that a school’s founding date should be the day on which it became what it is now – when its current name was bestowed on it. Before that, it was clearly something else, and to add those years in at the beginning of its history is manipulation of the historical record.

So, is Muir really our oldest school and if not, which one is?

Here’s a blog I wrote in 2019 which outlines my views.

The announcement that Hans Coetzee will be going to Hoërskool Durbanville as a rugby coach (and that’s great news for him and the school) included the line that they are building towards a successful 200th Anniversary year in 2026.

That got some people doing arithmetic and they found it means the school was established in 1827, which puzzled a few associated with Cape Town’s SACS, the school that most people (me included) refer to as our oldest school – established in 1829.

On their website, Durbanville say they are SA’s second-oldest school – meaning that Muir is the oldest, I assume. Which makes SACS only the 3rd oldest, and that confuses matters even more.

It’s an old can of worms, one that I've researched before and I found then that the origins of most schools are shrouded in the mists of time and often a bit dodgy.

SACS is generally accepted as the oldest, but its early days were tied to UCT - they even have the same badge - and Paul Roos, similarly, was part of Stellenbosch University.

Jeppe and KES are both Milner Schools (established in 1903), yet Jeppe's Centenary was in 1989 and KES celebrated theirs in 2002, which means they both claim to have been founded prior to Lord Milners’s 1903 proclamation. They, like many of our older schools, trace their ancestry to earlier institutions (some of which can only loosely be called schools) from which they evolved.

Muir College's Website has their establishment date as 1822. But, according to Wikipaedia, Uitenhage’s first Free Government School was opened in 1822. In 1875, the school, then known as the Public Undenominational School moved to Park Avenue and in 1892 the school’s name changed to the Muir Academy. That makes them 130 years old this year, according to my reckoning.

It looks, from the history of the school on their website that Durbanville was once Pampoenkraal and a primary and high school were established there in 1827, so I suspect that they have taken that as the beginning of the current Hoërskool Durbanville.

Someone sent me a list of some 20, mainly primary, schools that were established before SACS, and Durbanville but I couldn't find any of them still operating under the names given.

It's not important really, our traditional schools have all stood the test of time.

And Hans Coetzee was, at Monument, the most successful school rugby coach Gauteng has ever seen. Durbanville will be good in 2026, not matter how old the school may or may not be.

 

The Gauteng schools are babes in arms compared to the really ones in the Cape. The older ones are proud of their ages and they all celebrate their anniversaries.

Here’s a bit I wrote about the ages, claimed and actual, about the schools up here. It illustrates how murky these waters really are:

 

JOHANNESBURG’S mining camp roots meant that it was a pretty rough town in the 1880s. It’s interesting that, along with the saloons and brothels that flourished in that roughneck environment, one of the earliest businesses to be established was a newspaper (The Star’s first edition was in February 1887) and shortly after that, the first school was opened. Within just a few years of a permanent settlement being established the Church of England clearly decided the children living in the mining camp needed a Christian education.

It’s significant that the first two schools established were both church schools, and both monastic (single sex) institutions. They are St Mary’s, founded by the church in 1888 and St John’s, established in 1898. 

There is some controversy surrounding the ages of Joburg’s other oldest schools – few of them were established with their current names, in their current locations. In most cases, the oldest among them trace their origins to some sort of educational institution established in those early days which then became something else, then something else again and, eventually, morphed into the school as it is today. Both St John’s and St Mary’ have had their current names from the start. So they can legitimately call themselves the oldest and second oldest schools in town, respectively.

Perhaps there was a need for redemption in those times, but the replication of the traditional British schooling system was obvious and intentional when the first schools were established, and it would have profound effect on education in the country in years to come.

The first of the public schools to be established in the city was Jeppe High School for boys, in 1890, they claim, and there the controversy begins. Jeppe also calls itself a Milner school (more of that later) and Lord Milner only came to South Africa in 1897. Jeppe, the school’s history recounts, had its origins in another church school, St Michael’s College. The name Jeppe first appeared in 1897 when a school called Jeppestown Grammar School was opened by the then education department. That school later split into the boys and girls high schools and the Jeppe Preparatory School, so all three of them began their history some time after 1897. 

The local German School – Deutche Schule Johannesburg (DSJ) – was also opened in 1890 and that reflected the cosmopolitan population of the miners who came here in response to the gold rush. The school was called DSJ from the beginning so on that score it is Joburg’s third oldest school. It hasn’t been operating continually, however. The school was closed from 1914 to 1918 – the First World War years – and the teachers, all German citizens, were thrown in jail. Interestingly, by 1939 and the outbreak of WW II, pro-British political sentiments were apparently no longer as strong in Johannesburg and the school remained open. The DSJ celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2015.

Lord Milner, was the British High Commissioner of  South Africa during the South African (Anglo-Boer) War, and he established a number of schools at the end of the conflict, to be run according to the British tradition, with the objective of Anglicising the newly conquered territories.

There were 23 so-called Milner Schools in all, in the end, and four of them were in the old Transvaal Republic – Pretoria Boys’ High, Potchefstroom Boys’ High, King Edward and Jeppe. That also makes KES also one of Joburg’s oldest schools. It, too, traces its origins to an educational institution that was established in 1903. It was called Johannesburg High School for Boys and was located in a disused cigar factory in the town. It later moved into a mansion called Barnato Park and was a co-ed school then. The school moved to its present site in 1904 and the name King Edward VII School came in 1910. 

A school was established in nearby Heidelberg in 1903, called Volkskool. It still exists under that name so it, legitimately, can claim to be the 2nd oldest state school in the province, after Jeppe. It’s older than KES, which only took on its current name in 1910.

Our oldest schools have the right to claim their genealogy as they see fit, of course. What can’t be denied is that the oldest schools are generally also the most successful. The traditions at the schools mentioned above stem from their earliest days and from their roots in the British educational system.

It’s ironic that some of our schools (and some in Australia, the States and Canada) are more “British” in their educational outlook than those that exist in Britain today. I remember noting some time ago that the only schools in the world that still employ the old-fashioned English cricket coaching professional are in this country.

Through most of their histories, these old schools were elitist and wholly inappropriate to the social and political realities of South Africa. The best of them have since managed to blend necessary transformation with an adherence to the best of their traditions. 

 

Sometimes the kids just wanna have fun

 

In response to my blog about the under-14 water polo tournament last week, someone anonymous posted a comment describing what he saw at a tournament in Port Elizabeth which, he said, showed that the boys often know better what is important than the adults do.

I fully agree, and I’m repeating what was said here:

Maybe you need to hear an anecdote from a recent tournament I went to in PE. It was second team tournament at Pearson High School. Obviously these are older boys (I'm not comparing it to the u14 tournament) and being a 2nd team tournament (some schools sent a 2nd and 3rd team) it was fairly relaxed but at the same time boys being boys, very competitive.

The part that will tell you that they boys themselves understand what this is all about happened during the playoffs. As you know with these tournaments all the teams play the same amount of games so eventually there are playoffs all the way down the list including the wooden spoon.

Well, the boys decided that the wooden spoon game would be turned into the highlight of the tournament they were cheering and roaring away as if this was a world cup final. It helped that the game itself went to penalties and actually lived up to the hype that the boys themselves had created. Anyway it was a fantastic advertisement for water polo and for the fact that these young men understood what in the end was important to celebrate.

Anyway my point is the kids sometimes understand things better than the adults and we should relax and let them get on with it.

What a great story.

I’ve come across instances like that one from time to time in my 40-odd years of watching school sport and they are always heart-warming and should serve as a lesson and a reminder to the adults involved that having fun is the most important aspect of playing games

The widespread introduction of lightning warning systems and the completely justified protocols which call for fields to be cleared when the siren sounds, has taken away what used to be a great source of fun in the old days – the cavorting on a flooded field after the game has been called off following a big thunderstorm. The waterlogged covers on cricket pitch would become a giant slippery-slide with players from both sides diving, aquaplaning and shrieking with delight. And it wasn’t uncommon to see both rugby teams revisit the muddiest spot on the field after a rain-drenched game for a good old fashioned wallow.

You don’t see that anymore. Everyone has to wait for the lightning all-clear now before they can go out again. There are other safety concerns, I know, and I guess the potential damage done to the fields was unacceptable, but I remember seeing teachers going on and chasing the boys away, even in the pre lighting-protocol days, They were right, I  suppose, but if you believed having fun was important, and you enjoyed seeing boys from rival schools going a little crazy together, then, like me, you would have looked on smilingly whenever it happened.

I remember another occasion when the local responsible adults came along and spoilt it for the kids. It was at a boys schools interhigh athletics meeting and the high jumpers were all at the mat, waiting to get going. The organisers suddenly called a tea break and the teachers disappeared, leaving boys waiting.

There was no crossbar up and one of the boys decided to have a practice jump anyway. Another one followed him and pretty soon they were all having a go. Then it became fun. One boy did an elaborate somersault over the imaginary bar, followed by another – backwards. Before long everyone joined in, pulling off the most outrageous, gymnastic clearances, to great laughter and applause from all the jumpers, who had forgotten by then that they were supposed to be concentrating on beating each other.

Tea-time was soon over and, you’ve guessed it, the teachers hurried over and loudly berated the boys and stopped it all.

I was there trying to get a great high jump photo, instead I got some shots of boys having the time of their lives. They soon settled down and got ready for the serious stuff. I’d wager that few of them remember the heights they cleared that day, but they probably do remember that spontaneous fantasy jump-off.

I know all about the duty of care that teachers have, and about the importance of dedication and discipline etc, but let’s remember that the kids are supposed to be having fun as well

Let the little ones learn the game without the pressure of winning

 

I’m uncoachable. I know I shouldn’t be sounding off on social media – and clever people have told me not to – but from time to time I can’t help myself.

Accordingly, I took to the keyboard to express my disapproval about the season-opening under-14 water polo in Johannesburg being run as a tournament, with semifinals and a final, and a “best of tournament” team being announced.

My views were quite solidly affirmed by a pretty heavyweight list from the educational and sporting arena, but the organiser of the tournament wasn’t very happy, and he told me so.

He was right to be cross insofar as my Facebook post never credited him, and his school, for their efforts and the sacrifices they made in organising and running what was a three-day event. He correctly pointed out that the aim was to get the kids playing again.

And they had a great weekend of healthy sport in a quite magnificent water polo facility. I spent Friday morning there and I came away heartened by the numbers and interest at this age level, and impressed by the standard of play of some of the teams.

It’s not about me, I know, but I should point out that the idea of starting the water polo lives of grade eights who had never played before with a gathering at which they played multiple games and where their coaches could teach them the game and have them put what they learnt into practice immediately, was mine. I was chairman of the then Transvaal High Schools Water Polo Association and I got the handful of schools that played the game at the time to agree to it. We held it in the little pool at Highlands North, the idea being that the players could get more of the ball in that enclosed space.

The numbers have exploded since then, polo is being played at some primary schools, and the level of coaching has improved greatly. The boys and girls I saw last Friday had no problem playing in a 25m pool. The principle behind the festival, I believe, shouldn’t change though.

That’s where I don’t agree with the organiser of last week’s tournament. It is, he told me, a continuation of the Inland Cup tournament that has been staged at Crawford College over a number of years and it is a proper tournament, running alongside a friendly festival in which “non-competitive” teams played. He then accused me creating the perception that the atmosphere was competitive whereas it was about celebrating water polo and loving being back in the pool again.

My response is that, clearly, it’s not a perception – it was a tournament with semis and a final. And that is something that cannot be good for players so young who know nothing about the game yet.

Amazingly, there was a tournament at Grey College the week before (the 2^nd week of school) that was run as a competition too. By contrast, the Ken Short under-14 tournament, a national event hosted by Jeppe, was changed in 2020 - it’s 23^rd year of existence - from a tournament to a festival because it was felt it came too early in the development of those young players – and it is in March! The headmasters of the, mainly boys-only, schools involved agreed with that.

There’s no question that even those players who played  polo in primary school still have a lot to learn and competitive matches so early are not the best place for that to happen. The schools who have polo at their bespoke prep schools stood out at the weekend – they smashed everyone (which does neither them nor their opponents any good) - but the others are going to catch up to them and their greater experience in catching, passing and shooting isn’t going, on its own, to see them through in later years.

So, well done to the organisers of last weekend’s event. You certainly did provide an opportunity for those kids to get started in water polo and, hopefully, to start loving the game. It was a privilege for them to play in what must be the best aquatic centre in the land. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to see it being used for water polo.

I just think it’s too early for the little ones to be too focussed on winning right now.

The unique stories that make the top schools tops

Towards the end of my time at the Star I became involved in producing a supplement each February, celebrating the achievements of schools that excelled in the matric exams at the end of the year before.

We called in Excellence in Education - it used to be Top Schools, but the top schools it featured asked for the change as they didn’t want to flaunt – and it was unashamedly advertorial, which meant if you paid for an advertisement in it, you were guaranteed editorial space.

I thought of it in the last two weeks when 2021’s results were released and the private schools, mainly, went onto Facebook en masse to publish their astonishing achievements.

And they were homogenously astonishing. 100% pass rates don’t even warrant a mention, 100% university entrance rates are a given and everyone, it seems, got one or many more distinctions.

That the schools went to so much trouble in the presentation of their social media posts was significant, it showed that the print media is no longer an option. My Excellence in Education supplement is long gone, along with the rest of what was my Star of those days.

It occurred to me though, that those results were just about identical in all the schools. Every one passed, everyone got distinctions, everyone is brilliant. The schools could have cut and pasted from each other and no-one would have been the wiser.

I tend to see the point of Professor Jonathan Jansen, who asked in a recent column what the point of writing exams at all was, if you know everyone is going to get practically nothing wrong. Wouldn’t it be better to develop some other end-of-school assessment method, one that better evaluates readiness and potential ahead of tertiary study and the world of work?

It is what it is for now, however, and it’s a big marketing exercise for the schools – private and public.

Which brings me back to that supplement I used to do. In the beginning we used to ask schools to send editorial in to us. Speak of cutting and pasting! They all said the same things: we have the top marks, best sports teams and the greatest cultural programmes.

That’s when the writer I used to assist me at the time, the very smart Eulalia Snyman, came up with the idea of telling the schools that we didn’t want anything from them. We will speak to them ourselves and look for their unique stories. There is always a unique story, Eulalia knew, and she had a nose for them.

So we set up interviews and, sure, we came up with the things that made those great schools great – the special things that separated them from the rest and from each other.

I no longer operate in that world, so I’m not up to date with what happens there, but since retirement I spend a couple of days a week at Jeppe High School for Boys and while working on publicising their 100% pass rate and multiple distinctions last week I came across their unique story, one of them anyway.

They run a programme they call Bravehearts that singles out boys, at the beginning of Grade 12, who are in danger of failing at the end of the year, and gets on their case. It’s run by David Williams, an author and former journalist, who rekindled his love for teaching late in life and he monitors those boys and leads interventions, in and out of the classroom, aimed at getting them to pass. It worked in 2021 – it hasn’t always, it never will – but it’s something special. And it’s part of Jeppe’s unique character.

I trawled my memory for some of the other special things we came across in those days. The unique things that made the top schools extraordinary. Here are a few that come to mind, in no order and without pretending to include all of them.

St Mary’s runs one of the biggest Saturday School programmes in town. Their teachers teach hundreds of township kids in their spare time. It’s often the only effective teaching those children get, which is a story for a different time, and it gets most of them matric passes in the end. And teams of St Mary’s girls are there each Saturday making tea and sandwiches and serving it to those learners in their breaks.

The St Stithians campus has been declared a biodiversity hotspot. Apart from the wetlands, stream and forests which are protected and preserved, great effort has been made to make everything “green”. Recycling, alternative energy usage and conservation are part of everything they build and do. The children are being brought up in that environment and are being taught to believe in it. That’s special, and important.

I’d go to Saheti School every year. It’s one of my favourites. The unique and special thing about it is that it absolutely knows what its focus is. It’s about Hellenism and Greek culture, and academic excellence (the Saheti results were as brilliant as all the others on Facebook) and about educating children accordingly. Of course its also holistic and everything else is offered too, but there is a focus they stick to. I spoke to the director of sport there, Werner Janse van Rensburg, a former provincial and Varsity Cup rugby coach, who told me he has learned to reformulate his definition of winning. “We compete wherever we can, but we know what we are trying to achieve,” he said. There are lots of victories of a different kind along that path, I’m sure.

This is getting too long. So, briefly: at St John’s everyone, staff and learners, have to do a set number of hours of community service every year; at Roedean the norms and values of raising young ladies in the turn-of-the-century “English” way still loom large everywhere; and Brescia House is a Microsoft in Education accredited school where the innovative use of technology is prized above just about everything else.

Those were the stories we told. Those are what made those schools stick out in their world of universal excellence. Sadly, with the demise of print media, we don’t get to read many of them anymore. But they are there – behind the social media postings.