March 28th, 1953. John Hammond
This is a big day in the history of this School and we are grateful to all of you for coming here this afternoon to share it with us.
The generosity of the Beit Trust is well known in the Rhodesias and we at this School have received much from them. During the past eight years, 180 pupils of this School have had their fees paid for them by the Beit Trust, while generous grants have also been made for the purchase of library books. Today, we are here to express our thanks for this magnificent Hall and Library. No School could ever hope for better.
This Hall, designed on such generous lines, is equipped for any stage or cinematograph show which we may wish to put on. It will become the hub of the social life of the School and as it matures, it will record the School’s history and carry the names of those who have served it well.
The Library, where we shall shortly have tea, is a beautiful room, admirably suited for its purpose. There the pupils will come to appreciate the value of intellectual exploration, beauty and peace.
These contributions to the education of the boys and girls of this School cannot be measured. They become a part of each individual which will awaken in them new ideas of what is good and worthwhile. We are grateful beyond our powers of expression, to the Beit Trsut who have given us this wonderful building and we can assure them that no effort will be spared to make this a worthy memorial of the Centenary of the birth of the Founder of the Trust. We shall endeavour to ensure that the Memorial will be in better people as much as in bricks and mortar.
It is difficult on an occasion such as this, to give you a very comprehensive picture of what we are attempting to do at this School. Much will have to be left to your imagination. Samples of the girls’ needlework and of the boys’ art is set out for you to see. You will also have the opportunity of testing the girls’ cooking when we adjourn for tea while after tea a short play will be put on for your entertainment. For the rest, we shall be pleased if those who are interested will attach themselves to one of the pupils who have been detailed to help you look round the buildings.
In doing so, you will be able to picture for yourselves the normal everyday life which goes on here. It does not differ much from the life to be found in any secondary school. The pupils do nearly all their own domestic chores, cleaning the hostels, and tidying and developing the grounds and playing fields themselves. In the classrooms the scenes are much the same as in any school, except perhaps that the Staff have to spend less energy in persuading the pupils to work hard! In the dining hall and hostels there is the normal amount of clatter and chatter found in any school.
We cover the full range of secondary work up to the standard of the Cambridge School Certificate and some pupils, who aim to go on for study at Universities, return for a further year of post-certificate work. Results in these public examinations, have on the whole, been most impressive. In the first three years that pupils from this School took the Cambridge School Certificate, only three out of 83 were unsuccessful.
It is too early yet for us to judge with certainty how the former pupils of this School will react when faced with the greater freedom and the larger responsibilities of the outside world. We have the evidence that, in so far as examinations can test it, these pupils have the capacity to do well. We wait now for those reports which trickle in from time to time, telling of success and failure in the world for which we are attempting to train them. Should any of you come in contact with those who have been trained here, I hope you will spare a moment to tell us how you find them. Please do not attempt to spare our feelings, we are keen to know of our failures as well as our successes.
We want to know if they have the right attitude to their work, if they are well mannered and if they accept responsibility. We want to know, in fact, whether our attempts to train their characters are producing results. Examinations are very satisfactory things for schoolmasters. They assess, objectively, the success or otherwise of one’s work. They do this so successfully that there is sometimes a danger that we may come to the point where we feel that the work of the classroom is all that matters. I am asking that as many of you as can do so, shall act, as the opportunities occur, as examiners of our efforts to make these boys and girls into useful citizens.
It is imperative that we should succeed in this task because we are now training those who will be foundation members of a new class in African Society, a class who will have to assume responsibility, not only in their own professions, but in the social growth of the African people of this part of the world. On them will rest the responsibility for maintaining and building up standards of morality and integrity and behaviour which will act as a pattern for others. They are pioneers, and we are most anxious that they should start out along the right track. We solicit your co-operation in our attempts to achieve this.
When we look outside the confines of our daily jobs, where we are concerned primarily with the development of individual boys and girls … and when we try to assess the educational task before us in this continent, we have cause to wonder whether our efforts can every produce results quickly enough. The speed at which results can be achieved in this 20thCentury has increased enormously in almost everything except schooling. The Medical profession has devised rapid, easy and relatively inexpensive ways of controlling most epidemic diseases. The politicians have, at their service, all the modern means of telecommunication for the dissemination of ideas. Industry and Agriculture and Commerce, all have mechanical aids to speed along production and turnover, provided the labour to work their various devices is available.
But schooling cannot be hastened. We still need to take a sixth of mans’ allotted span to bring him to the stage where he can begin to be fully educated and no machine, and no vaccine can contribute very much towards hastening the process.
In Africa the problem is made even more acute by reason of the enormous backlog which has to be made up. Added to this, we lack, in the main, the educated parents, who, in most other countries can lay a foundation on which the schools can more easily build. On the other side of school life there have been, ever since this continent was settled by Europeans, more jobs than people to fill them and this has led to a lighter discipline and a more indulgent attitude from employers than has been the case elsewhere.
The schools, therefore are forced to carry not only their own responsibilities for the dissipation of ignorance and the inculcation of habits of discipline, but they have also, in part at least, had to take on some of the responsibilities normally assumed by parents. At the same time they must try to turn out people whose standards of discipline and behaviour will persist into their lives after school because, in this country the thought of losing a job does not yet have the same disciplinary effect as it does in most other parts of the world.
This is our problem as I, a Schoolmaster, see it. I am amazed that, taken by and large, our success in tackling it has been as great as it has, and that our failures have not been very much more obvious. We must, however, ask ourselves if the traditional methods of school education will ever, by themselves, be able to outstrip ignorance, before it, ravishing our soils, and wasting our resources, leads us inevitably to shortage of foods and goods and all the calamities which would follow in the wake of such shortages.
The “white man’s burden” hitherto has been an administrative burden, today it is an educational one and is no longer the “white man’s burden” – it is the ‘educated man’s burden”. If we are to overcome ignorance within the space of time allowed us, we cannot expect success if the schools system alone has to bear the main burden. Even assuming that all necessary finance were to be provided, the shortage of men and women qualified to teach in schools, would still limit the rate of progress to a dangerous slowness.
I can see but one answer and that lies in the rapid increase of well educated people, who, in their everyday lives, may assume some part of the responsibility. We cannot do it on our own. Therefore, every housewife who insists upon habits of cleanliness in her kitchen, and on hard work in her garden … every farmer who demands a straight furrow in place of a wandering one … every industrialist who insists on punctuality and high production, and every business man who insists on accuracy of work and honesty in dealing with other people is contributing his or her portion to the solution of this problem. And if this problem is to be solved we must have more people more conscious of the immense task which lies before us all.
To Africa’s educated minority I appeal for a more conscious effort to assist in dissipating ignorance; to Africa’s uneducated and semi-educated youth I would suggest that learning can be obtained elsewhere than in schools if you are but prepared to be taught; from Africa’s parents, I request a firmer discipline of the children and insistence on good behaviour in the home and a search for other avenues for the instruction of your children if you cannot provide it yourselves and if the schools cannot take them.
You will, I hope, forgive me for having thrust these rather pedagogic ideas upon you. I know that your interest in our efforts here is considerable and I have therefore taken the liberty of trying to put before you my idea of what our aims must be.
Ladies and Gentlemen may I repeat our thanks for your attendance here this afternoon and once again express our very great thanks to the Beit Trustees and particularly Colonel Ponsonby for handing over this Hall and Library for our use.
I now have pleasure in inviting you to take tea in the Library, and to see our first production on this stage immediately afterwards