Ah! The good old days of carrots, sticks and sirens

Ndumiso Ngcobo wonders why so many people believe what is needed to fix education is a return to the basics from the “good ole days”

Let's suppose Gauteng MEC Panyaza Lesufi is being interviewed on talk radio about some aspect of education, and not about his gallant effort to return Moroka Swallows to the PSL.

It is highly improbable there will be more than four callers without some Beatrice from Plettenberg Bay saying: "What we need to fix education is a return to the basics from the good ole days."

That train is clearly not run by Metrorail because it is never late. And then she will go on about discipline. Not that I necessarily disagree with my hypothetical Beatrice. Common sense dictates that a lot of what is broken in our education system has to do with the basics.

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The chances of children saying "5 + 4 = 54" diminish exponentially when teachers arrive at school with the necessary qualifications, not reeking of booze and not horny. You'd be surprised.

From Grade 5 until Grade 7 I went to a school called Wozanazo Higher Primary in Hammarsdale. The pillars of that school when I was there were discipline, discipline and discipline. If you complained about too much discipline, the principal, Mr Sibisi, would use sophisticated logarithms to come to the obvious conclusion: that you were sorely lacking in discipline. And then you would get an extra dose of it.

We didn't have a school bell. We had a loud siren not too dissimilar to the one that wailed when the guards at Shawshank Correctional Facility discovered Andy Dufresne had escaped through a sewer.

If it sounded while you were still making your way to the gate, you would find the Afrikaner deep inside you and go, "Goeie genade! Hier kom kak nou." This is because Mr Mhlophe would be standing at the gate with a piece of hosepipe, ready to top up your inadequate discipline. On your fingers. On a windy day in the middle of June. At 3°C.

The most curious thing about Mr Mhlophe was that, as eager as he was about hosepipe duty, his appearances during double Afrikaans period after lunch on Tuesday were as regular as the president's appearances for question sessions in the National Assembly.

And then we had a Ma'am Ntuli. A lovely, gentle soul. I really liked her. My armpit wasn't as enamoured with her, though. This is because she deliberately let the nails on her right thumb and index finger grow long so she could pinch your armpits effectively if you were being unruly. Until I was pinched by Ma'am Ntuli I hadn't realised the armpit was so blessed with nerve endings.

My best friend in primary school, high school and beyond was Sifiso Maseko, who heads up Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital. We were also fierce rivals for the top position in class. But we were both notoriously sloppy, with putrid handwriting.

block_quotes_start I hope no one hallucinates that I'm saying that discipline is an undesirable feature in our schools block_quotes_end

After one Physical Science test where both of us missed out on 100% scores on account of our unintelligible scrawl, our teacher, Mr Mafoko, called us to the front, wielding a stainless-steel ruler. I giggled internally. What pain could be inflicted using a ruler? And then he told us to put the tips of our fingers together. Oh, sweet Virgin Mary and the entire choir of seraphim!

Not all the interventions on our slack discipline were physical. Some were deeply psychological. Mr Mtshali, my class teacher in Grade 7, is the man I credit for the eight As I achieved in my national exams that year. It's more complicated than what I'm about to say, but the summary of that year is that he beat the distinctions out of us.

However, like the CIA and the FBI, he didn't just rely on waterboarding . Back in the mid- '80s, the Bantu Education we received was designed to produce semi-literate domestic workers and gardeners. This was so that we could work out that, if the baas had 24 shrubs and eight hours to finish pruning them then, give or take 15 minutes for bread with strawberry jam and tea in a tin cup, you needed to spend 20 minutes on each . Anyway, we had an afternoon period called Gardening. I wish I was making this up.

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I've shared this story before in a different context in this very space. Some fellows who must have been some kind of "clever blacks" figured out an elegant method of uprooting carrots during Gardening, munching them and returning the stems to give an impression the plant was still intact. But they were caught. The next day they were paraded during school assembly.

Mr Mtshali instructed them to re-enact their "ingenious" carrot heist in front of the whole school. It was simultaneously painful and hilarious watching the boys squatting and jumping from spot to spot, nibbling on invisible carrots like rabbits. The coup de grace was that they had to walk around the school for three days, with signs that read Isela lezaqathi (Carrot thief).

I hope no one hallucinates that I'm saying that discipline is an undesirable feature in our schools. All I'm saying is that even though I think food without a little bit of chilli is bland, chilli never goes anywhere without heartburn. Put differently: as the folks from Durban discovered a few weeks ago, when you pray for rain during a drought, don't forget that mud is to rain what Hutch is to Starsky. You hardly ever get one without the other.

E-mail Ndumiso Ngcobo at lifestyle@sundaytimes.co.za and follow him on Twitter @NdumisoNgcobo