I'm delighted that the disgraceful "initiation" practices at Parktown Boys' High School have made it into the media and caused outrage among parents.
I don't usually admit publically that I attended that school, because it is nothing to be proud of. What I am proud of is unlearning all the crap they tried to instil in me - a process which wasted five years of my post-school life which should otherwise have been fecund ones. I attribute none of my social ability, my artistic success, my human decency to that school - what they tried to teach me was aggression and uniformity, and that if something wasn't done on a sport field it wasn't worth anything. If you didn't do it on a sport field, you weren't worth anything.
When I was there, from 1986 to 1990, senior boys routinely bullied smaller boys with the overt encouragement of the senior, male, teaching staff, including Tom Clarke, the headmaster there since the late 80s. "It was done to us, so we'll do it to them" was the general cant, "It builds character." What it builds is psychopathy. Just like Clarke, the practices they perpetuate from year to year are a throwback to a militaristic, traumatised period of our country's history. The school's dark halls seem to have escaped transition, and frankly I'm amazed that Clarke is still in charge - for me, that's like Adriaan Vlok as our current police commissioner.
Despite the administration's intentions, there were pockets of value and learning there. I enjoyed my small group of lateral-thinking friends, the civility taught in my mother's Latin class, the drama club, the seditious History Society, the writers' club, the astronomy club, all of which were marginalised, underfunded and unsupported by the school and some of them even actively resisted and shut down by the school's administration. A teacher was fired for allowing political discussion at break in the History Club.
Though I didn't have it particularly bad, in my early years there, I was hit by senior pupils and by teachers, had piss bombs thrown at me, was forced arbitrarily by a senior boy to stand and hit my friend in the face (something I am still ashamed of) and be hit by him; not to mention, of course, the daily idiocy of learning first-team rugby players' names, cadets (yes, junior army, complete with unisyllabic 16-year-old sarges who take out the violence of their home life on some disempowered children), and the like.
Anyone who's been to boys' school will know these are very regular things, that you don't complain, and if your parents were to complain, you'd be stigmatised and targetted for life. I know for damn sure that if someone treated my son the way I was treated - and again I say I wasn't particularly targetted - I would go around there and kick some serious ass. (Needless to say, my son won't be going anywhere near that school or its ilk.) I am thrilled that the new generation of parents seems not to buy into this psycho-macho code of silence and abuse, and at the same time, I feel for their kids who are now going to be victimised or forced to leave the school.
I'm pleased to have the chance to speak out in support of these youngsters and their parents, and perhaps, selfishly, to answer some of the smug bullying which I had to bear in silence all those years ago.
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