[The following essay should be viewed as a work in progress, as I am not completely satisfied with it.]

Our experiences in the early days of school are, I believe, the foundation for everything that comes after that.  Although a good teacher later on may overcome a negative experiences in the early years, nothing is better than a beginning that instills a love of learning, respect for education and educators, and a sense of discipline.

I was fortunate to have received my early education at a prep school in Rondebosch, a suburb of Capetown, South Africa.  (How my American family came to be living in South Africa for nearly eighteen years is another story.) 

Rondebosch Preparatory School, modeled after the British prep school, had an academic year divided into quarters and running from January to late November.  After the end of the year, we had a six-week summer and Christmas holiday (remember, we’re in the southern hemisphere where December is summertime).  The first, second, and third quarters were followed by holidays of ten days, three weeks, and ten days, respectively.  I haven’t done the math, but I suspect that we had more days in school than American public school students do.  The process had greater continuity than the American system does because we were never out of school for an extended period of time.  Academic years coincided with calendar years.  Furthermore, we had to pass a battery of exams to move on to the next grade (or “standard,” as it was called).  Nobody at Rondebosch had ever heard of “social promotion.” 

Rondebosch Prep comprised Sub A, Sub B, and Standards 1 through 5 (in all, the equivalent of grades 1 through 7 in the American school system).  The high school (though it wasn’t called that) comprised Standards 6 through 10 (grades 8 through 12).  Before we returned permanently to the States, I had completed Standard 5 (Grade 7).  My older brother received all of his education primary and secondary education at Rondebosch, and my older sister did the same at Rondebosch School for Girls, the “sister” school of Rondebosch Prep. 

The school my brother and I attended was exclusively for boys.  Although my older sister went to the “sister” school, I didn’t have any idea what they studied there.  I suspected that it was cooking, sewing, and maybe witchcraft (though, in fact, the girls followed rather the same rigid curriculum as the boys did).  Because, at that age, I wasn’t much interested in girls, it didn’t disturb me a bit that there were no girls in the school.  In fact, I never thought about it and just assumed that this was the way school was supposed to be.  In retrospect, I believe that it was good not to have members of the opposite sex around to distract and mystify me (as they were to do – and are still doing – the rest of my life).

We wore school uniforms – a blazer with the school emblem on the pocket, short pants, and almost knee-high socks.  Around Standard 5, we began to wear to long trousers, a symbol of our transition from boys to “young men.” 

All the boys at Rondebosch were divided into “houses,” sort of like the houses at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter books.  Each house was associated with one of the school colors.  Fletcher was light blue; Marchand, dark blue; and Andrews, gold.  I was Marchand.  I don’t recall whether we were assigned to houses or chose them ourselves, but we remained members of the same house throughout our school careers. 

The houses were more than a quaint formality.  They produced a kind of bonding among their members, and we associated with boys whom we would not normally include among our circle of friends.  Consequently, the kinds of cliques that flourish in public schools – based on popularity or some other transient criterion – were unknown.  Although, of course, we had personal friends outside our own house, each of the three houses fostered an esprit de corps that resulted in intense but good-natured rivalry.  Everyone in the school belonged to a larger group, and every one of us learned how to take our house’s victories with cautious pride and its setbacks with grace and dignity.  Nobody was on the outside looking in. 

The main function of the houses, however, was to promote healthy competition in intramural athletics (primarily rugby and cricket), in which everyone was required to participate, and in academics.   Since I lacked the aggressiveness to be any good at rugby and did not have the hand-eye coordination for cricket, I was a liability to Marchand on the playing field.  However, I made up for it by exelling at academic work, where I earned points for my house, and by being well-behaved so that my house did not accrue negative points.  That’s how it worked – when one or more members of the house excelled at anything, all of its members were rewarded; when they got into trouble that required disciplinary action, the entire house was penalized. 

Indeed, discipline was at the heart of our education.  When a teacher (master) entered or left the room, we stood up.  When we answered or asked a question, we raised our hands and, when called upon, stood up.  For more freewheeling discussions, the master could suspend the rules, but that was his prerogative, not ours. 

A brief digression here:  When we permanently returned home (as my parents called America), I had completed Standard 5, the equivalent of seventh grade.  My parents wisely decided to place me in an American seventh grade class in the middle of the academic year instead of waiting until September to enroll me in eighth grade, thus allowing me six months to adjust to coeducational classes and the more lax discipline of American public schools. 

After a brief interview with the principal, I was inserted into a seventh-grade classroom and seated with no further introduction.  Class was already in session.  It was, I recall, a geography class, and geography had been, coincidentally, one of my strongest subjects at Rondebosch.  Shortly after my arrival, the teacher asked a question for which I knew the answer.  I raised my hand.  I should note here that I did not volunteer to answer because I lacked shyness.  I was, in fact, scared silly.  But, in all my schooling to date, it would never have occurred to me not to raise my hand when I knew the answer to a question.  It simply wasn’t done. 

At any rate, the teacher, delighted to see such immediate involvement by the “new kid,” called on me.  I stood up.  The class began to titter.  Although the teacher gestured to me to sit, I remained standing and, in a distinctly South African accent (which, of course, sounded British to the other students), began to answer the question.  The tittering gave way to astonishment.  I was an instant celebrity.  After that class, in the hallway outside the classroom, I was surrounded by kids.  “Are you from England?” “No, I’m from South Africa.”  “Didja see any lions?”  “Only in the zoo.”  (Disappointment all around.)  “What sports didja play?”  “Rugby and cricket.”  “Didja play baseball?”  “No, no biseball”  All the way through my senior year, I could not lived down my pronunciation of “biseball.” 

To return to Rondebosch, discipline also included corporal punishment in the form of caning.  Serious infractions of the disciplinary code – ranging from continuously talking out of turn in class, to showing disrespect toward teachers, to outright cheating (rare and more likely to result in expulsion than caning) – could result in one’s being required to lower one’s pants and be given one to six “cuts” with a bamboo cane.  Most of us would probably have agreed that the indignity of such punishment was worse than the physical pain. 

Such measures. of course, could get out of hand, and perhaps they did because, during my time ar Rondebosch, the rules were changed so that only the headmaster and assistant headmaster could administer canings.  Indeed, in my last year at Rondebosch my home room master, Mr. Holmes, was the assistant headmaster, and we occasionally had the dubious pleasure of watching him administer a caning to some miscreant who had been sent to him by another teacher.  Mr. Holmes had refined caning to an art.  In the front of the classroom, hanging in a small closet, were about six canes, all of which had names.  Of them, “Daisy” was renowned as the most effective and painful; when Mr. Holmes chose this cane, we know that the infraction of the rules was very serious.  Fortunately, my backside never became acquainted with Daisy. 

Of course, other disciplinary techniques were used, and only the most incorrigible students suffered the pain and indignity of caning more than a few times in their entire careers.  I heard that the ruler-across-the-knuckles technique was used by some teachers, but I believe that it was frowned upon as a an impulsive act, whereas caning was almost a planned ceremony.  One effective and physically painless disciplinary measure was the writing of “lines.”  If we misbehaved or failed to do homework, we might find ourselves writing the same sentence (“I shall never again refer to Mr. Holmes as a ‘bloody fool’”) a hundred times or copying a short passage from a book so many times that we were reciting it in our sleep. 

The masters had many ways of keeping the attention of young boys who would rather be doing anything else than sitting in school.  Some of them (Mr. Holmes, for example) did so by injecting anecdotes and humor into the lessons.  But not everyone had his gift for entertaining while instructing.  One master in particular (I have forgotten his name) had a unique ploy – he had mastered the art of throwing chalk with the accuracy of a sharpshooter.  If a boy dozed off or indulged in obvious woolgathering in his class, he was likely to be suddenly jarred back into reality by the crack of a piece of chalk on the desk in front of him.  This teacher never missed.  He always hit the desk, not the boy, though sometimes one might be hit on the chest or shoulder by the ricochet.  To paraphrase an old saying about hangings, there is nothing that concentrates the mind more than the threat of being hit by a piece of chalk. 

I don’t want to give the impression that physical discipline was the sole basis of education at Rondebosch, but it was an important part of the mix – a means to an end.  Through discipline, we learned to respect knowledge and those who devoted a good part of their lives to giving it to us.   We learned that acquiring knowledge was hard work, requiring effort and concentration, but somehow we became impressed that it was worth the effort.  We needed no idle pats on the back to develop our self-esteem; rather we developed it through genuine accomplishments, large and small, that brought honor to us and to the houses we represented. 

Many years later, and even today, I carried those messages with me – that it is infinitely rewarding to learn, that one should respect those who teach, that genuine effort harvests huge rewards, that learning is not undertaken to impress others as it is to build strength in oneself.  Outside school (and sometimes inside it), life is not always fair – good is often not rewarded, and evil often goes unpunished – but knowledge coupled with honor increases the odds that we will prevail, as individuals and as a species. 

When I ceased to be a student at Rondebosch, I was, of course, no longer officially a member of House Marchand, but Rondebosch and House Marchand had become a part of me.  To this day, as an old man, I continue to learn and to respect learning, to teach whenever I have the opportunity – for Mr. Holmes and all the other masters (now long gone, no doubt), for the honor of House Marchand, for Rondebosch.