Educational Icebergs - toe dipping across the Atlantic

My vocational visits this week allowed brief exposure to two extremes of educational opportunity in New London county: Pine Point School and the Waterford Country School. The educational landscape in this part of the world is very diverse, and much like an iceberg, I suspect my surface insights fall far short of the nuances of terminology, structure and pedagogical approach that I am noticing.

One underlying theme, certainly in these two schools, is the way in which children are met where they are at, or to put it differently, treated as individuals. Brighter students from more affluent backgrounds such as Pine Point are stretched to excel, but equally, youngsters who have faced a variety of traumas and who cannot operate within mainstream schooling at Waterford, are helped to function as best they can.

Both schools are small by South African standards and well resourced, yet the value of each school cannot be measured by the tangibles, the material resources. Rather, it’s the people who operate in the schools who are so astute at connecting with young people, who strike me the real champions of the system. In Pine Point there were a slew of staff working after-hours, again by South African standards, tailoring lessons to meet and stretch kids in their care. At Waterford, Walter and Nancy, who I guess had interesting upbringings themselves, struck me as intuitively smart at reaching out and connecting.

I remember once hearing a definition of good education as being a “conversation between the generations”. Conversations require an ability to listen to one another. Some conversations require tough things to be said straight up. How often do South African teachers truly listen to the heart beat of our nation? How often do we as teachers listen to each other? How often do we move the conversation between ourselves as educators away from petty gripes about state failures or union issues, and instead ask how is this kid in front of me actually doing? What’s happening in their life that I need to understand and with which I can engage?

I cannot understand how our entire teacher corps can accept only half out of every year cohort making matric in the requisite 12 year schooling period. Do enough of us really care? So far I have met a number of humble, astute professionals, who are a credit to the communities they serve in New London County.