Education to Change the World

A very recognisable quote as we rounded a corner in Boston

While in the USA, I visited a few of the 1 200+ schools* (see below). I was struck by two characteristics which I believe are common to the education system in America. One was the accessibility of the education and the other was the balance of the curriculum. 

For Americans who want to study, there are federal grants and bursaries and many of the universities, even those like Harvard, offer needs-based scholarships.  This means that if you have the academic ability, by and large, lack of funds need not be a stumbling block. This results in a diversity of students which I found exciting.

I was also very taken with the liberal arts core of the curriculum. Subjects like art, history, music and science, form the basis of an all-round foundation. In other words, graduates who are able to hold forth on a variety of topics, are being produced. Majors are only declared in third year. 

Education was the tool that the South African government used to oppress us…education was meant to keep us in our place. You were able to learn just enough for the jobs that you were expected to do; depending on the colour of your skin, you had enough education to become a factory worker, a maid or a gardener, or if you were lucky, a teacher or a nurse. 

My grandfather taught me that education was the one thing that the apartheid government couldn't take away from us; that they had taken away our rights, property and opportunities but they couldn’t take away what was in our brains, they couldn’t stop us from learning. I believe that it’s the same tool that was used to oppress us that must be used to uplift us. So many generations of people in our country haven’t had access to education. We’ve come a long way from where we were but we have to keep fighting so that our children, and our country, can have a better future. 

I know that the American school system is far from perfect, but I think that this kind of accessibility and well-rounded curriculum is something to strive for. 

*A four-year college or university offers a bachelor's degree. Programs that offer these degrees are called "undergraduate" schools. A "university" is a group of schools for studies after secondary school. At least one of these schools is a college where students receive a bachelor's degree

Made it to Mid-term!

It’s been pretty quiet on this side of the blog front as I juggle student life with being the toilet fairy. This week we have been on vacation, NOT holiday, I must stress. At post-graduate orientation one of the professors informed us that it was called a vacation, because you vacated the university campus to go and work at home!

So indeed, here I am having a break, working on a short story, writing a 2500-word book review and sourcing images for another course.

Walking has kept me sane. I am out there at 7 in the morning doing eight kilometres three times a week, putting one foot in front of the other. It clears my head as I move through the neighbourhood and I often come back having mentally worked out an issue.

So many people are asking my daughter what it is like to have me on campus. For the record let me say that we hardly see each other and only share one lift. I promised that I wouldn't be hanging around on the Jammie steps with her. Anyway she is way too cool to worry about whether I am cramping her style or not.

Now if it was my son, it may be a different story. Although last week he took one look at me parked in front of the TV with a packet of chips and a mug of tea (comfort after a 3-hour workshop) and said, “You’re turning into me!”

I have survived the first term and am enjoying the breather. I have gotten over both the shock of the youth and the technology (well, sort of) and think that pretty soon I will be able to hold my own. Every day I come home in awe of how much I am learning. I feel so blessed to have this opportunity to be back at university. I even found myself wondering what I could study next, once this was under the belt...Okay, it was very briefly...

Diary of a born-again student

Things are starting to settle down a bit around here. We haven’t had take-outs for supper this week...yet. In fact, yesterday getting groceries and preparing dinner seemed far more attractive than usual. Something familiar that didn't take much thought. I could just cruise through on automatic pilot.

Some days my head has felt ready to burst. A few days ago I sat down with a cup of tea and the Sudoku puzzle - anything that didn't need words. I'm starting to understand why my adolescent son communicates in grunts. With all that is going on with his body, plus school it’s all that he can do to piece together words for food or a lift.

Last night he was doing his Maths homework with a friend, via SKYPE. One of my courses is completely computer-based and has had me waking up nights with my stomach in a knot.  To address my technological inadequacies, I have found someone who is sympathetic to the challenges of the “mature woman” to do some computer coaching with me. 

After three sessions I feel like we have done some feng shui for computers and simplified matters. My daughter was greatly puzzled by the fact that he had whipped out a pen and paper to explain things to me, but that is exactly the level that I needed to start from. 

I have been telling the kids, much to their amusement, that I am going to be sooo clever by June...either that or I’ll be crazy! To put a positive spin on the stomach in a knot part, I am trying to convince myself that, come the end of the semester, I am going to be blessed with a six-pack – which is also one of my son’s goals in life. I am starting to notice a bit of regression on my part...

Surviving School

Do you know those Tom and Jerry cartoon images where Tom has stuck his finger into a plug socket and is bolted up into the air, every hair on his body standing on end? Well, that's how I have felt for the last ten days. 

At my very first lecture last Tuesday I thought I was in the wrong place! All around me students who looked 19 (but couldn't possibly have been since this was a post-graduate course) spoke with American accents and the lecturer was explaining elementary things like where District Six was and that the boxer in the black and white photo from the 1950s was actually Nelson Mandela, not Muhammed Ali.

It made sense when I realised that the course was being run in conjunction with Brown University and that there was a large contingent of exchange students attending. The clarity lasted about five minutes before we were being told about setting up websites, creating Tumblr accounts and joining a Face Book group. All this would be used to monitor and assess our involvement!

Later in the week I was in a lecture on African Non-fiction Literature. This time the class was smaller and there was only one American voice, but listening to these young ones talk, I had the distinct feeling that I have missed out on a few steps...like studying English language and literature...

We are a group of diverse writers in the Creative Writing seminars and I am sure that we will learn much from each other and the many established authors who we will be meeting during the course of the year.

 Everyone assures me that I will be fine once I get into the swing of things. I just need to find a way to channel the adrenaline which seems to be coursing through my veins, clearly my body has been preparing for flight. My brain, however,  has prevailed and here I am gearing up for the second week. 

As time goes by

When I was at university in the 80s, I took notes by hand, and rewrote them at night struggling to decipher my feverish scrawl at the small desk behind the door in the room I shared with my sister. My sister surrounded her bed with a ring of salt to ward off evil spirits which she feared may have come in with the black bag of bones I had brought home for my Anatomy studies.

But I digress. Back in the day, it was acceptable to hand in assignments which were "neatly hand-written" if you didn't have access to a typewriter. Computers were still a dream, like democracy.

My dad owned a small grey Olivetti typewriter. Every evening he would sit at the kitchen table and pound away at the black keys using two fingers to write his reports or exam papers.  The tick-tack-tick-tack rhythm of the machine interspersed with a “cling” and a “swish” as he got to the end of the line, was calming, like a bedtime story, when we were too old for a nightly installment from “365 Bedtime Stories”. Sometimes, when he wasn't busy, I would get to use it for a special assignment, correcting paper at the ready...and carbon paper for copies.

I was thinking about this while trying to decide what courses to do this year, now that I am planning to charge up the brain cells. “You can look everything up before you go to register,” said my daughter. For once she didn't roll her eyes at my technological challenges as she downloaded the faculty handbook and guided me through the 400 pages.

“Are you sure you need to go to orientation all day?” she asked. “You’ll probably find your way around just fine.” Well, having not spent any significant time on the main campus the first time around, I do need a bit of help trying to “navigate the administrative maze of post-graduate studies”. I would hate anyone to have to spread salt to still my spirit if it takes to rambling around the ivy-covered buildings! 

Blue and Yellow Moneybox

Me with Pa circa 1965

Today is the anniversary of my grandfather's birth. I am thinking of him particularly this year as I embark on a new course of study. Pa changed the course of my life with his little blue and yellow UBS moneybox. Every evening, from the pockets of his khaki coat, he would take out the coins he had gathered during the day. He would allow me to put them into the money box. “For your education,” he would remind me. I had grown up with the mantra, “They can take everything away from you, but not your education”. 

He believed fervently that I would have to study further so that I could be independent. By the time I had finished school he had saved enough to pay for my first year at university. With a brave smile pasted on my face and the weight of generations of expectation, I embarked on a very different voyage. 

In 1980 it was no easy feat for "someone of colour" to be accepted by the University of Cape Town. 

Entering university was such a cultural onslaught that I might as well have been in a different country. The campus was overwhelming. I think my entire school could have fitted into the Jagger Hall. There were lecture halls and sports centres,  buses shuttling back and forth, and more "white" people than I had ever seen in my life. And I was able to sit next to them in class, on the bus and in the library. Although, when it came to doing clinical practice in the hospitals, we were not allowed to treat "white" patients.

My grandfather died before I completed my degree and did not get to see me graduate, but as he had envisioned, I am independent. And I did not stop studying. The learning path he set me on more than thirty years ago has evolved to take me to the far corners of the world. Along the way I have earned a few more diplomas and certificates. And here I am embarking on another journey which is taking me back to my alma mater in a new South Africa, without a special permit, simply because I want to and I have the ability. 

There is a quote by Joseph Goldstein a  Buddhist teacher, that goes something like this: “If you are already facing in the right direction, all you have to do is keep on moving”. Pa made sure that I was facing the right way. Happy Birthday, Pa. I hope you can see me moving forward. 

Reaping the Benefits

Having been swept up in the flurry of the end of the year, I am a little shell-shocked to find myself landed in the third week of January with my daughter about to start university. It has been a long time of concentrated effort – mock exams first and then a month later, the finals. It seemed that they had no sooner done one set of exams when they started the next. I could almost see all the adrenalin draining out of her body after she wrote her last paper.

I am happy to report that the exams have gone well from all perspectives. Our military-style operation (yoga, shiatsu, diet, boot camp) has paid off and here we are, reaping the rewards of hard work. Not only has she been accepted at the University of Cape Town, she has been offered a scholarship based on her academic performance....very proud family!

She only applied to UCT (“because you and dad went there”). Dad and I needed special permits to attend the university as we were not white. It makes me even prouder that here she is, no baggage, in her own right and on her own merit, entering UCT. I’m looking forward to this new phase in all our lives.