Unionless and united to learn

The road trip into rural Umkomaas is deceptively beautiful.

You drive along a winding road surrounded by green hills looking down on the spectacular ocean below. This is the land that Alan Paton wrote about.

On this warm morning in rural KwaZulu-Natal, you remind yourself that the rest of the country is shivering in the bitter cold of a concluding winter.

"Everything keeps going right," I think as I travel with board members from the Toyota Foundation to visit one of the schools they support.

The dip down one of the many hills brings you alongside the gate of Dlambula Primary, and the first thing you see is a beautiful garden, built by the children. You enter a rock-solid school building, built by the community. You see the elementary science equipment, raised through funds from the community. You see children beautifully dressed in their brown uniforms, paid for by the community. The singing that greets the small group of visitors lifts the human spirit as the melodies seem to drift across the hills down to the valley below.

But what grips the visitor is the buzz in the rectangle of classrooms surrounding the sparse inner courtyard.

Every class has a teacher pacing energetically down the narrow aisles between rows of desks. In one classroom the children are reading aloud to two adults. In another they are writing furiously. I can see a vibrant question-and-answer session in a third classroom. From another angle big boys are carrying pots of food, for the lunch break is close. Not a single child drifting aimlessly out of the classroom. Not a single teacher in the staff room, for there is none.

I move towards the primary school children in the choir to check whether this rare picture of energetic teaching and learning is a set-up. I am going to test their language skills, and so I ask them some tough questions in English, no doubt a second or third or even fourth language for these little ones. They speak better English than some of university students I once taught from this area; their vocabulary is extensive; their insight and anticipation of the questioning brilliant.

The smallest child recites the most beautiful story in isiZulu, a gift for which she won some prize. I pose the problem ½ x ¾, a problem beyond the grade level of the class I am standing in, and a young girl jumps up with the correct answer.

But it is the confidence of these rural children that surprises me, their capacity to hold down serious conversation with a professor from another place without the slightest hint of discomfort.

Here's the rub. The classrooms are hopelessly overcrowded with more than 60 children in the first class I peer into. There are enough teachers but not enough classrooms, so grades share a class. The solidly cemented classrooms have roofs that leak in the winter. The blackboards are so old the chalked writing is hardly visible.

It is tough teaching at Dlambula Primary, and even tougher growing up in the community around it. A senior teacher speaks with emotion about a girl in the school whose mother was beaten, robbed and raped, and her body then placed on a nearby railway line. Fortunately, the train driver stopped in time and the body was removed from the coming crush. The girl is still in the school, the body still in the morgue. We all sit with knobs in the throat.

How can a school be so good, so resilient, despite the difficult social and economic conditions of the area? How does a poor community give of its last cents to build this school? How do teachers keep going despite the horrible traumas that children bring into the school from their broken homes? How do the children stand up over and over again, determined not to succumb to the devastation around them?

It's quite simple, really. When you meet the principal, you sense strong leadership. When you listen to his deputy principal and the senior (all women) teachers, you sense a collective commitment to simple things, like "the children come first". The school is spotlessly clean, always a sign of a strong learning culture. The chair of the governing body, a simple man, is also impressive for this is his school and he plays a key role in keeping his leadership accountable for learning.

The parents did not build this school only to sit back and not participate in what happens there.

There was no sign of the teachers' union.