Early Basis of Education
What an extraordinary adventure it all was. Men possessed of intelligence and of a roving spirit and sometimes of frail bodies and tubercular lungs set sail for the southern tip of Africa, taking with them the torch of culture and learning to a country where until their arrival education had been 'by drought and flood, by wild beast and savage man, by grass, by plain, by disease, disaster and sudden death'. (Pells.)
Whether they came with the intention of starting anew in what seemed to be a promised land, or to escape the murderous damp of European cities, they were almost without exception welded by a singular belief, one that formed the basis of education as it is known today in South Africa.
That force was religion. Based firmly in the morals of the Old Testament, it followed the hardy pioneers wherever they went.
And so they came to the shores of a foreign land, these men and women, and in many cases headed out into the veld or joined a budding settler community and set up a little school.
The strain must have been terrible: life was tough in the early years of the colony; there was no cultured society in which to mix, and educated men must have felt bereft of intellectual company.
Although many of the early educators died of the illnesses that brought them to the country in the first place, more than one took their own lives. Many lost children and spouses to illness or war.
A handful returned home, but others stayed and coped with the rigours of frontier life in their own ways. Some gave up teaching for the more lucrative pastimes of publishing or shop-keeping; others succumbed to human frailties, turning to the demon drink or, perhaps driven crazy by the African sun, ended their lives as 'lunatics' in grim sanatoriums.
Pioneer Educators
With very few exceptions, however, the reputations of these educators shinedown through the years. A single word, a frown, a chuckle, even 'six of the best' — these meant the world to the pupils under their control, and those children carried the memories of their schooldays and, particularly, their masters, with them throughout their lives.
Those early teachers educated the youth of the country (often boys and girls, black and white together, indiscriminately), instilling in them the ethos of excellence that had been born in Europe's halls of learning.
The pioneer educators who brought with them from those far-off cities their deep religious convictions were like the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was the beginnings of modern South Africa.
A vital rite of passage in the life of the early colonists of the time was to be admitted as members of their church, for if they were not, they could not legitimately marry, procreate, or die. The Protestant-based Dutch Reformed Church demanded that its members be able to read the scriptures, write their names and recite the articles of faith.
This kept alive a flame of formal education and basic literacy even in times of harshest discouragement; and well into this century, this system of religious instruction was called the 'Boere matriek'.
Scholarchs Become Anglicised
The Dutch-descended pioneers, while being tied umbilical-like to their religion and church, detested and defied central government control. Largely for this reason, coupled with the geographical vastness of the country, until Union in 1910 three of the four provinces enjoyed a virtually autonomous regional education system. Only the British colony of Natal was ruled with the iron rod of the Empire.
As early as 1714 the Dutch governor Chavonnes had set up a board of education, consisting of Company officials and church elders, called the Scholarchs.
In Cape Town, church halls and warehouses doubled as school rooms and itinerant sailors' accommodation — and so the children would hopefully scan the horizon each day, searching for the white sails of the merchant ships that would mean a landing and subsequently a few weeks' holiday as their classrooms were turned into hostels for the seamen.
It was under Governor Lord Charles Somerset that the first infamous attempt to 'anglicise' the Dutch-speaking community of the colony began.
To this end, hardy Scottish preachers and teachers were imported to the Cape along with the first wave of British settlers. Together they had a profound effect on the religious and educational life of the country.
First Superintendent-General of Education
But it was one man who in the end can be said to have educated South Africa. Aberdonian James Rose Innes was in 1839, appointed the first Superintendent-General of Education — in South Africa and, remarkably, in the English-speaking world.
It was Rose Innes who established for the country's schools the hierarchical system that lasted for the best part of the next hundred years.
In the western and eastern Cape (and, soon, in the Orange Free State and Transvaal republic's), first-class schools provided primary and secondary education, and in some cases tertiary to boot; in the smaller centres second-class schools provided only primary education; and the third-class schools, in the country districts, provided rudimentary education in the form of basic literacy and arithmetic.
Milner Schools
In the Transvaal there was but one school of note until the end of the South African War. The Treaty of Vereeniging that brought the fighting to a close was followed by a period of reconstruction, which included the establishment of the 'Milner schools'.
The state funding of these institutions meant that the Transvaal's government schools kicked off on a high note and never looked back, unlike the private and state-aided schools in other parts of the country, which fought a continuous battle for survival. In Natal, a separate British colony at this time, the schools system evolved a little differently.
The only two state schools were instigated by the local citizens, for in Natal the state and the church were not synonymously linked in educating their subjects.
But what all these schools had in common, regardless of the region in which they were established, was that they were based, consciously or otherwise, on the tradition of the British public and grammar schools of that time.
Bishops Diocesan College (commonly just known as Bishops) is a distinguished boys’ high school situated in the leafy suburb of Rondebosch ...
The University of Cape Town (UCT) is the oldest university of South Africa and one of the most prestigious in Africa....