The Big Read: Let's not throw baby out with bath water

Hair apart, the old English public schools offer the best education to a broad base of black and white pupils, almost all of whom are headed for great careers at home and abroad as part of a small elite in post-apartheid society.

From the High School for Girls (its actual name) in Pretoria to the unpronounceable Sans Souci Girls High School in the posh Cape Town suburb of Newlands, these are prized institutions of learning which have rightly come under sharp public scrutiny in the past two weeks.

But I fear that in responding we might have the old baby and bath water problem; throwing out both will further diminish the few good public schools still available in South Africa. If only citizens showed the same level of outrage against the dysfunctionality of the majority of our schools as we did against the hair-management policies of a few good schools, we could change public education overnight. But I digress.

Now that the heat has subsided somewhat, we must distinguish two things in the hair debate. One is regulation and the other is racism. Making crude and racist comments about black children's hair is so obviously wrong, spiteful and demeaning, and is rightly judged. But these old English schools, like all good schools in South Africa, black and white, have regulations to bring order, discipline and some measure of control to the management of hundreds of young girls and boys from very diverse backgrounds.

I have spoken at assembly to the girls of Pretoria High School for Girls (PHSG) and Sans Souci, and I sent my daughter to the one in the north. Why? Because they offered high-quality education in a public school environment.

At the PHSG assembly I addressed the problem of overregulation in the lives of young women. As usual, I did this using a combination of humour, straight talk and playing jazz on the school piano to demonstrate how improvisation of a revered or traditional piece of music breaks the stifling culture of overregulation.

When I suggested at PHSG that the kids break out of their constrictive school culture and, at least once, bolt out of the gates for a day of illicit fun in Hatfield, the girls rolled with laughter, the principal froze on the stage, a teacher wrote me an insulting letter, and the school never invited me back.

But I remember, as a PHSG parent, questioning why my daughter was compelled to do knitting when my son at the boys' school up the road did nothing of the sort; some parents climbed into me that night. I questioned why the girls sat in winter on the assembly hall's cold floor at a school that clearly could afford chairs. I was perturbed, as a Christian, that they still held assemblies as church meeting, given the many other faiths, including Hindu and Muslim now represented in the school. My daughter then in Grade 8 made it clear to me that I was disruptive on parents night and that she would prefer that I did not embarrass her. She was right.

If these old English schools have the maturity of leadership it will make the crisis an opportunity to revisit and revise some of the traditional practices which might have meant something in the early 1900s but is completely out of date in a constitutional democracy built on nonracial and nonsexist principles in the 21st century.

I made the point, by the way to the outgoing principal of Settlers High School in Bellville: change the outdated name while you can. He never wrote back.

But these old girls schools should keep the best of their traditions which have carried them through two world wars, the horror years of apartheid, and still they stand.

There should, however, be some measure of regulation. There should be a standard for hair, albeit a different one from the present. The uniform must remain, if only to offset a class war focused on dress. There should be standards of address for adults and children, both respectful.

This is the opportunity to build new traditions - rather than simply uphold the old - that bind the students together long after they left school through shared and treasured memories of practices and beliefs held in common.

In this regard, school authorities should stand their ground, and not allow for uncontrolled public sentiment and naked political opportunism that makes the baby indistinguishable from the bath water.