SCHOOLS ARE CHANGING THE WORLD
A REVOLUTION is taking place in Bellville.
Recently the school community of DF Malan High School was locked in raging debate on whether to change the name of the school. Daniël François Malan, who the school is named for, served as prime minister of the National Party government, and played a pivotal role in laying the foundations of apartheid. The school faces the problem of its association with him and the deep traumas of our past.
Since the school in its culture, curriculum, and public voice distances itself from the ideologies and societal legacies of the man, there is no need to change the name – its identity is a healthy one, some argued. To change the name will represent a denial of the school’s history and journey to where it is today. Others argued that to keep the name inevitably will represent precisely the opposite in the mind of a broader society and keep the suspicion alive that the school community secretly still support racial segregation.
In the end, the latter argument won and in a recent election of the school governing body the school community, with a 72.1% majority, voted for the name change. The WCED must now approve the proposed new name, Discimus Faciendo (We Learn by Doing) Academy.
However, not far from Bellville, a revolution is also taking place in Eerste River. In 2018 Acorn Education, a not-for-profit education organisation, launched one of the first high schools as part of a new WCED project for public-private school partnerships – the WCED Collaboration Schools. Apex High School is a no-fee school in Blue Downs, serving the poorest learners from the surrounding communities, including daily meals for many.
At the end of last year, Apex won an inaugural Super Schools award. In October this year its principal, Renate van der Westhuizen, was awarded the Excellence in Secondary School Leadership for her innovative leadership style at the National Teaching Awards. However, most critically, the school now sees its first group of matrics writing their final exam, working for a 100% pass rate.
The Apex story is a significant one, the storyline of Eerste River represents a revolution. However, beyond the revolutions for identity and access that the recent histories of DF Akademie and Apex High School represent for their communities, a revolution of sorts in high school education recently emerged from a university campus.
Earlier this year the University of Cape Town announced it will launch an online high school at the start of 2022. Developed and managed in partnership with a private and well-regarded institute of education, the school will make all its curriculum materials available online for free to learners and parents in support of self-directed learning, while requiring class fees for in-person tutoring and for teacher graded assessments, among others.
In a post-Covid world, where virtual modes of teaching and learning are taken as a solution to problems of access to, and the high cost of on-campus and in-person high school education, this online school and its offering represents a revolution. A revolution because the ways wherein teachers teach and learners learn requires and builds independence and commitment to learn, characteristics which traditional education often struggle to inculcate.
On the surface, each of these stories seem disconnected due to the diverse histories and communities they represent. However, read at a distance, they together reveal how schools change the world – changing who we are at DF Akademie, what we think at Apex High School, and, with an online school, how we teach and learn.