Jeppe pride lives on

If you've lost all faith in good old-values public schooling, and were considering moving your children out of this country, do not make that decision until you have visited South Africa's most fabled high school on the appropriately named Good Hope Street in Johannesburg.

Every student tiptoes around the large emblem of the school engraved into the cement as you enter the front door: Forti nihil difficilius. You can smell the history of the school in the main hall, with its old wooden floors and black-and-white photographs of men's sporting teams dating back to the early part of the previous century.

I knew I was in a special place.

Unlike all the famous old public schools I have visited, this one has the least pretence. Everything looks ordinary, even cheap. Many of the boys are from struggling families, several from working-class backgrounds. All the stuff in the principal's office could sell for less than R1000 to a generous buyer.

Even the striped black-and-white blazers look second-hand.

The hall is under construction so I have to speak to the 800-odd boys in the blazing sun outside. Yet the school oozes culture, values and self-belief like I have never seen anywhere else. All boys, big and small, stop to greet the overweight black stranger on their premises.

A respectful and emphatic "sir" is a common word in every space on this sprawling campus with its impressive sports fields.

This, after all, is Jeppe Boys.

And so I steer the conversation to its most famous teacher, Jake White, the World Cup-winning rugby coach. I am greeted by its most famous unofficial teacher, the elderly Mr Ledwaba, who doubles as a science laboratory assistant, though his real job is caretaker.

Ledwaba, who obtained his science degree last year, points proudly at the plaque reading "The Ledwaba Stairs" that leads into the main building. Every old school has a powerful narrative that defines its core identity. For Jeppe, it is the story of the Jackson clan, whose father arrived at the door of the school many years ago, an orphan from Rhodesia who was shunted to Durban and then to Johannesburg, with nothing at all.

The school turned an orphan into a decent man whose sons also attended Jeppe. It is a story of how a poor boy can become a decent man.

It is the story of Jeppe. Its website declares proudly what no other English school has as a line of distinction: "Jeppe has never been an elitist school." The Theo Jackson Scholarship Fund supports poor boys; sports and academics are not that important, says the fund. Character is. That story of struggle and the virtue of character run like a golden thread through the history of Johannesburg's oldest high school since the 1890s, when it experienced financial difficulties after the school was closed for the duration of the Anglo-Boer War.

It is that badge of struggle, that nothing comes easily, that character is everything, that is written into the Latin motto (at the start of this column): "For the brave nothing is too difficult."

Jeppe is a reminder of how the story of struggle can become the foundation of enduring values of gratitude, generosity and goodness rather than of justified greed: ("I did not struggle to be poor") and the impulse for selfishness ("It's our time to eat").

Solid as a rock, this school, which has lost old boys to at least three wars, tells the struggle narrative differently, with humility and with a sense of service to others.

In a centenary year for an important political party, Jeppe offers a model of how to tell the story of a difficult past that can enhance the greatness of an institution by retaining at the centre its founding values. Now, confronted with an army of boys on the stands, I remind them of the values of a good public education, of how the spirit of humanity can triumph over the emptiness of materialism, and of how the privilege of a being in a good school carries with it a sense of responsibility to the less privileged.

Then, the fearsome war cry.

In this most racially integrated of public schools, the boys lock into each other around the shoulders, and move slowly from side to side as a whisper becomes a deafening crescendo of manly sounds. The opening line catches my attention: "All we see is the black and white."

I think I know what they mean.