My early education was remarkable for many reasons. Woodmead School near Johannesburg, the senior school I attended from the year of its founding in 1970, was both progressive and experimental in ways that would have made it an anomaly anywhere at that time. It was so not least because, during that year, the pupils made decisions in debate with each other and with the staff that turned out to be fundamental to the school’s character. The fact that the very terms on which the school operated were negotiated with the pupils made the Woodmead experiment distinctive from other well-known experimental schools, for example, A S Neill’s Summerhill School, and Bertrand and Dora Russell’s Beacon Hill School, both in England. That the school was founded in apartheid South Africa during a period when state repression was at its height made it even more anomalous, so anomalous that it is hard to believe that it really existed.
The South African state had installed two systems of education: ‘Christian National Education’ for the privileged white minority, and ‘Bantu Education’ for the oppressed Black majority. The former was explicitly designed to mould children into Christians who believed that God had chosen white Afrikaners to establish racial supremacy in South Africa. Just as explicit was the mission of Bantu education. As Hendrik Verwoerd, then minister of ‘Native Affairs’, said in 1954, it was to teach ‘the Bantu’ that:
There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his own community and partially misled him by showing him the green pastures of European society, in which he was not allowed to graze.
There were differences, to be sure, within the system of Christian National Education. Government schools, which had been segregated well before the National Party came to power in 1948, were rigidly divided into Afrikaans-language schools and English-language schools, and the ideology of Afrikaner nationalism was somewhat diluted for the latter. Several of them, long established in urban centres, had a more benign understanding of the ‘white man’s burden’ in a former British colony, one more in tune with the segregationist and colonialist policies of the United Party that the virulently racist National Party had bested in 1948. While these schools attempted to maintain their identity in the face of increasing exertions of government control, their ideologies were not distinct enough from apartheid to form a real basis for resistance. There was much to Verwoerd’s jibe that they amounted to showing Black South Africans ‘the green pastures of European society’, but not allowing them ‘to graze’ there.
The same was true of the many privately funded and hence fee-paying schools, usually tied to a particular religion. Most prominent among these were the English Protestant, Methodist and Catholic schools, which followed different models within the British private school system. There was (and is) even a school called ‘Roedean’, a private school for girls named and modelled after its renowned counterpart in the South of England, and founded by the younger sister of the women who founded the original. These schools were single sex, restricted to whites and, like some of the government schools, more inclined to a colonialist and segregationist ideology than to apartheid. But they were generally conservative, disciplinarian and increasingly subject to government control, in part because the final school exams, the ‘matric’, were set and marked by a national board.
For example, the prescribed book for matric history in English schools was A N Boyce’s Europe and South Africa: A History for South African Schools (1971). The book gave an account of colonialism, segregation and apartheid itself, which suggested that these systems of domination served the interests of the Black majority population as well as those of the white minority. It gave the Great Trek of the 1830s and ’40s – in which Dutch settlers left the Cape for the interior to escape the abolition of slavery – the same quasi-religious status this event held in Afrikaner nationalist ideology. And in its account of the Second World War, it glossed over the horrors of Nazism, perhaps because of the inconvenient fact that prominent members of the first National Party government had been interned during the war as Nazi sympathisers. In addition, Afrikaans was a compulsory subject in English schools, and a significant part of the curriculum involved learning long lists of offensive ‘Englishisations’, which a language police was determined to eradicate and replace with sometimes comical Afrikaans equivalents. For example, English proverbs could not be translated literally, so ‘the fat is in the fire’ had to become ‘now the dolls are going to dance’, and ‘he let the cat out of the bag’ became ‘he let the monkey out of the sleeve’.
As minister of Native Affairs until 1958, Verwoerd was responsible for a slew of statutes that enforced segregation of the ‘races’ in all walks of life: economic, social and political, including the educational sector. Because his ministry was the engine room of government policy, he earned the title ‘architect of apartheid’ and, as prime minister of South Africa from 1958, he presided over the crushing of any resistance to his policies. The main liberation organisations, notably the African National Congress, were banned and their leaders were executed, assassinated or, like Nelson Mandela, sentenced to life imprisonment. Repression on this scale was enabled by expanding and modernising the police, and a vast security apparatus was given unlimited powers to detain without charge or trial opponents of apartheid.
Woodmead School was the illegitimate child of one of the private schools, St Stithians College in Johannesburg, a Methodist school for boys founded in 1953 and still thriving today. The official history of the school reports that Steyn Krige, the founder of Woodmead, was the school’s second headmaster. The history does not record that the school governors in 1968 fired Krige and David Brindley, a teacher of English.
Krige was himself a deeply religious Methodist. But, while socially conservative, he was also a man of profound political liberal principle and had a reputation as head of St Stithians for attempting to provide a different kind of education, which largely consisted in encouraging pupils to think for themselves by persuading the teachers to adopt progressive teaching methods and to discuss controversial topics in class. This may sound trite today. But in the 1960s, the apartheid government had engaged in a period of brutal repression, not only of the Black political movements that resisted it, but also of the minority of whites who opposed its ideology.
At St Stithians, conservative staff members and the school governors were not happy with Krige’s educational approach. Things came to a head when Brindley published in the school magazine, which he edited, an article by a boy about his struggles with his sexuality. Brindley and Krige were called before the governors, and Brindley was fired for refusing to give an undertaking not to discuss controversial issues in class. Krige supported him. He was fired too.
Krige had an unshakable faith that these children would be fine in the right educational context
Krige was indomitable. Together with Brindley, Roger Petty (a St Stithian’s history master) and a group of parents who admired the oasis he had created at St Stithians, Krige set about founding a new school that, just over a year later, opened its doors in Woodmead, a new suburb of Johannesburg. The school started with just 54 male students, spread across the first four years of the five-year South African high-school curriculum, from Standard Six – the first year – to Standard Nine. The Standard Nine class was largely made up of boys from St Stithians who, with their parents, were devoted to Krige, and other standards also had a sprinkling of such boys, including some who had been pupils in St Stithian’s preparatory school. That the Standard Nine, the most senior class at the time, had this core of ‘Krige devotees’ in it was crucial to the later success of what became known as the ‘Woodmead experience’.
Otherwise, we were a motley assortment. Besides the St Stithians contingent, there were boys from families like mine. My mother spent her adult life as what today we would call a human rights activist, working for liberal-Left NGOs. My father was a Holocaust survivor, uninterested in the politics of South Africa, but whose life experience left him with a deep hatred of nationalism in all its forms. It was my mother who heard of the new school, and my father was delighted that I would escape Christian National Education. But there were also boys from two troubled groups: boys with learning problems, prominently undiagnosed dyslexia, and boys who had been expelled from private schools because they were too unruly. (Naturally, boys from the first group often took out their frustrations by joining the second.) Woodmead was thus a school of last resort for parents at their wits’ end about what to do with their children. The school took them because Krige had an unshakable faith that these children would be fine in the right educational context.
During the first year, there were no rules, yet surprisingly chaos did not ensue, perhaps mainly because we were so few in number, divided more or less evenly into four standards. In addition, we all knew well the rules that prevailed in the disciplinary regimes in the schools from which we had come, and those rules informed our understanding of correct behaviour, even among those who had in their other schools been prepared to face the beatings customary for rule infractions. Finally, I suspect that we were all marked by the deeply authoritarian context in which we lived, evident in that we, or most of us, took for granted that even a new progressive school would be composed of boys from the white middle class. The only two exceptions were boys of Chinese origin, who could be there by special permit because the Chinese population of Johannesburg was too small to have a separate system of high schools.
There could have been a fourth factor that would have made a huge difference to the future development of the school. Its absence had everything to do with the presence of at least several of the Standard Nine contingent of boys from St Stithians who were determined to ensure that the school would turn out both experimental and progressive. These Krige devotees had to resist the efforts of others who – having survived the ordeal of being subjected not only to their school’s formal rule but also the informal rule of older boys over younger – wanted to enjoy their turn wielding power. In regard to the informal rule, I recall anxiously waiting to hear the outcome of the debate among the older boys about whether they should replicate the system of institutionalised bullying that they had suffered in previous years. In regard to the formal rule, it was standard practice at all schools that the teachers would select a few boys from the final year to be ‘prefects’ and one to be ‘headboy’. They had special privileges, including the authority to punish younger boys, and so could make their lives hell.
We voted to get a distinctive uniform as we wanted to be publicly identifiable as ‘Woodmeadians’
The devotees were inspired by Neill’s account of Summerhill School, and by a book with the title Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) by the American educator Neil Postman. After much debate, they came up with a ‘School Constitution’, a formal manifesto for the school that included clear demands for no corporal punishment, no prefect system and instead a students representative council, no uniforms, no hair policies, and the admission of girls.
Some of these issues were decided by negotiation between the Standard Nines and Krige, who agreed, for example, that we would have a student representative council, with half appointed by the staff and half by students. Others were decided by a school-wide vote. For example, a majority of the pupils voted that the school admit girls, which it did the next year. Perhaps more surprising is that in the first year we stood out from other schools in that we had no school uniform, perhaps only because there had not been the opportunity to design and order one in time for the school’s opening. But we voted to get a distinctive uniform as we wanted to be publicly identifiable as ‘Woodmeadians’. As it turned out, this was only necessary for the girls. At other schools, the enforced haircut regime for boys was ‘short back and sides’, and since many of the Woodmead boys took full advantage of a freedom to grow one’s hair as long as they liked, this alone marked them out as distinctive.
In my view, the Krige devotees of Standard Nine set the stage for the remarkable experiment that followed, and it was the leaders among them who made the difference. One, Stephen, stood out. A classmate of his told me that Stephen ‘was the driving force behind anything that we as students contributed to the school philosophy.’ As I have only recently learned, his father was a communist, and political issues were freely discussed at home, though Stephen and his younger sibling knew full well to be careful what they talked about when they left the house. (It had been a crime since the early 1950s to be a member of the Communist Party in South Africa.) In a recent exchange, a mutual friend said that Stephen was part of the ‘woke faction’ among the Standard Nines. ‘No,’ Stephen responded, ‘we were the revolutionary faction.’
What did the revolution bring? A lot depended on the teacher. Most taught their subjects as if they were at any high school, albeit in a generally much more relaxed atmosphere. Our English teacher was not only authoritarian and old fashioned, but would lose his temper and assault pupils, though carefully picking on boys not girls and then on boys whom he sensed would not run home to complain. He resigned only after a delegation from our class went to Krige to complain after witnessing one such assault during class. We were then assigned to Brindley in our Standard Eight year, a world of difference. We learned no English literature in class, as most periods were devoted to discussing whatever controversial topic he wanted to provoke us with on the day. Our main literary activity was writing a play to be performed at the end of the year, with the basic theme that any rational person should be an atheist. In an ironic repeat of the past, Krige got wind of this play, perhaps from an upset parent, and insisted that Brindley insert into the script Krige’s own extended theistic responses to the atheistic dialogue. Brindley refused and resigned midway though the year. When he announced his imminent departure to our class, I blurted out in some shock: ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ His sarcastic response – ‘Don’t worry, you will get your first-class matrics,’ ie, the marks necessary in the final school exams to be admitted into university.
This prediction was a little shaky. The school had expanded exponentially in the second and third years. This was not mainly due to the intakes of girls, but to the many boys who arrived from other schools where they had either been failing, or expelled, or both. Standards had to be divided into two classes, ‘A’ and ‘B’, with A for the more academic students, and B for the students who were struggling in one way or another. With increased class size came unruly behaviour, sometimes extreme, and with unruliness came rules, but only for the majority. A hierarchical system was put in place whereby students who could be trusted to do the right thing without being told were moved by the teachers into the top tier where they were free of rules. Everyone else was placed in two other tiers with more limited freedom, with those in the lowest tier subject to a law not very different from that of any private school. However, that law was not enforced in a brutal fashion since Krige met with the executive body of the students representative council and decided together with them on the appropriate punishment. Since those in the B classes were for the most part in the lowest tier and all those elected to the executive were in the top, being on the executive, as I know from personal experience, made one most unpopular, particularly with the B classes.
I was doing badly and yet coming second in the class. Krige’s response was: ‘Exams aren’t everything’
While not replicating the hierarchy outside, Woodmead was thus creating its own problematic hierachies to manage its problems, arrangements we by and large did not question because we were so used to other hierarchies. Moreover, the presence of a large contingent of Black staff to do all the menial tasks, who lived on the property in segregated, customarily poor conditions, passing silently and subserviently among us, meant that even those students inclined to spend time in class and out debating progressive ideas took for granted some aspects of apartheid as the natural order of things.
The school’s hierarchies did little to solve the problems. Academic standards slipped to the extent that my parents decided to take me out of the school at the end of Standard Eight. They had noticed on my mid-year report that I was failing Latin, hitherto my best subject, doing badly in everything else, and yet coming second in the class. They went to see Krige whose response was: ‘Exams aren’t everything.’ And so, with the distinct prospect of me not getting over the quite low bar of a first-class matric, my parents placed me in one of the two private Jewish schools in Johannesburg, but relented when I sank into a long depression.
There were other problems. In the second year, the school had moved to a sprawling rural property outside of Johannesburg, formerly a holiday resort. It was too big to be policed and, in any case, it was against the ‘Woodmead spirit’ to do that. Along the banks of the large river that ran through the property, not only clouds of cigarette smoke, but also clouds of highly illegal ‘dagga’ or weed smoke hung overhead. There was an occasional but not rare problem with violence, as many boys in a generally violent society found resort to fists and feet a quick way to try to relieve their frustrations. The school thus developed a reputation not so much for progressive and experimental education but for drugs, sexual libertinism and general bad behaviour. Since most Woodmead boys even out of school uniform could be easily identified by their long hair, we did much on weekends to enhance that reputation.
With the benefit of half a century of hindsight, I suspect that Woodmead, like most, perhaps all, experimental schools, was subject to the problem that it could not help but be deeply marked by the established order from which it wished to escape, even as it descended into some kind of chaos in making the attempt. Yet, despite the problems and its inability to effect more than a partial escape, Woodmead was for a long time successful, at least for many of the people from my years and beyond.
The constitution states that ‘it is not the school’s task to persuade and mangle [the student] through matriculation’
Those who wanted to go on to university did so, though often by the skin of their teeth. One boy began with me in Standard Six as a quivering wreck from a year in which he had failed his Standard Six exams at a brutal private school where his parents had parked him while they waited for Woodmead to open. He is now one of the world’s leading political theorists at an Ivy League university. His older brother, who was in that influential first Standard Nine class of Krige devotees, makes classical guitars for elite musicians, while one of his group became an engineer working in NASA’s Deep Space Network. Another boy from my class went on to become one of South Africa’s most famous athletes. Two girls who arrived in my class as ‘refugees’ from Roedean went on to careers in the UK, one founding a not-for-profit provider of psychological services, the other as a successful banker. Several students rose to prominent positions in the opposition to apartheid and several had senior roles in the first post-apartheid government, including the aforementioned Stephen. He had left South Africa for Germany midway through his matric year to avoid conscription into the South African military and eventually became chief spokesperson for the mayor of West Berlin. After reunification, he was convicted of serving as a KGB agent while working in the mayor’s office. (His motivation, the court found, lay in his wish to contribute to the struggle against apartheid by supporting the country that most strongly supported the South African liberation movement, and so he was sentenced to time served awaiting trial.)
What accounts for this success? In the first year, Stephen and some others established a school magazine, The Phoenix. In one of its issues, there is an article on the philosophy of the School Constitution which states, in part, that ‘it is not the school’s task to persuade and mangle [the student] through matriculation, but is the school’s task to see him as a whole individual and to develop him body, mind and spirit. To teach him to think, to use his inherent gifts and to encourage him to mature to the full extent of his own potential.’ Somehow the school did that, sometimes in tangible ways. One example came about because Petty, our history teacher, knew Boyce, the author of our prescribed history text.
Boyce was both a professor of teacher education at the University of the Witwatersrand, the main bastion of liberal education in South Africa, and chief examiner of history for the national Joint Matriculation Board. Petty invited Boyce to come to our class to talk to us about his book. A few of us loved history and did our own reading, as a result of which we despised his book. We gave Boyce a tough time. But he answered us carefully and fully, patiently explaining why he had accepted to write a book within the ideological limits set by the state. We were not persuaded, though I think we were impressed.
Woodmead itself did not succeed in the long term. The odds were stacked against that. In 1979, it was the only high school that began to take immediate advantage of a new government dispensation that permitted private schools to open their doors to significant numbers of Black children, which says much about the extent to which white South Africans had bought into apartheid. Woodmead continued to thrive into the 1980s, but in the 1990s it opened a preparatory school whose main catchment area, as Johannesburg expanded, was composed of conservative whites, who then took over the school board. They made a series of inept and questionable financial decisions that led to the school closing in 1998, four years after the formal end of apartheid.
Perhaps, as one of the group of Standard Nine Krige devotees recently explained to me, Woodmead floundered ultimately because it was trying to swim against a powerful tide, but lacked a firmly established educational ideology that it could clearly counterpose to the prevailing public and private educational options. Yes, it advocated for the general tenets of a liberal, progressive education (by definition, quite ‘alternative’ in the South Africa of the time). But it did not have the luxury of being selective. As a result, without an established foundation, in the context of a society undergoing huge political, social and economic changes, it was not sufficiently robust to withstand the pressures of being the school-of-last-resort for a relatively large number of troubled students.
Still, for at least two decades, Woodmead had in its way flourished, and it did this despite the vicious segregation, oppression and censorship all around it.
