I was a pupil in 1980 and part of 1981 - my Standard 6 and 7 years - and the current imbroglio has caused me to re-evaluate my feelings and thoughts about my experiences there.
I was one of those pupils who did not respond well to the humiliation and abuse meted out by senior pupils and teaching staff.
Even today, writing this, I have to suppress my reaction of being labelled a "wussy" or some other less-than-a-real-man epithet.
I imagine some of my former classmates reading this and saying: "But you're still such a girl!"
The correspondence in your newspaper has been strongly divided into those very pro "the making of the man" model and those horrified by the brutalising of young boys.
I write to shed a little light, perhaps, from a different angle by admitting some of the personal consequences of my short time there.
I don't wish to itemise specific incidents of being singled out during "prefects'" assemblies, being caned by masters (including my "lady" Latin teacher), or the humiliation I endured on my bus trips home but, rather, to emphasise that ultimately the experience imposed on me, willy-nilly, a monolithic and unbending stereotype of "the measure of a man"; a blunt and insensitive archetype of masculinity.
I was then (and still am) a somewhat "bookish" and introvert individual and, as a result of my unwillingness to conform, the abuse intensified to such a level that I felt forced to make a traumatic exit from the school in mid-Standard 7.
I then moved on to the mixed-sex Hyde Park High School where, in hindsight, my by-then sorry case was handled with remarkable sensitivity, given the constraints of a public high school environment.
In spite of the evidence of a successful career, my adult life has been haunted by a perennial sense of having "failed" somehow and, in many subtle ways, my relationships, including my marriage, have been coloured by a vague feeling of "inadequate" masculinity.
Many of your correspondents who have expressed a positive attitude toward events at Parktown Boy's High aver that graduates of the school have gone on to become captains of industry, accomplished sportsmen and other such societal luminaries, implying that, because the boys were "toughened" at Parktown, this is the path to leadership and success.
The assertion is patent nonsense. The history of human achievement in the sciences and the arts is peopled with men of towering stature who were not tormented as boys (Albert Einstein - Nobel Prize, Physics, 1921; Richard P Feynman - Nobel Prize, Physics, 1965) or who succeeded in spite of being brutalised Beethoven; Johannes Brahms; Rudyard Kipling; George Orwell). In contrast, the annals of cruelty and warfare are inhabited by individuals and groups determined to impose their lockstep mentality, their own narrow stereotypes, on us all (Hitler, the National Party, the Taliban).
Desmond Morris, the zoologist, in a recent sequel to his book The Naked Ape, makes this remark:
"Thankfully, for the majority of men in the developed world today, there is the personal freedom to make up their own minds.
"The bigotry and cruel punishments of earlier epochs are a distant memory. […T]he result is a more varied, more individualistic and more intriguing social world for us all to enjoy."
Martin Trollope
Albertville, Johannesburg
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