Be prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn

Education is not only what you learn in school.

In fact, your most important educational experiences might very well be what you learn outside school.

Was it not Irish playwright GB Shaw who famously said that ‘the only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school’?

Writing my memoir, Breaking Bread: A South African

Memoir of Living, Learning and

Leading on Both Sides of the Racial Divide (Jonathan Ball publishers, forthcoming), I became painfully aware of how much I had learnt, positive and negative, from institutions outside my school.

Among those institutions, the church played a major role in shaping my starting values and left me with serious inhibitions that still tie me down. I cannot dance. My evangelical church, called the Brethren, was formal, conservative and reserved thanks to missionaries from England, Ireland and Scotland.

Any frivolity was frowned upon, any signs of exuberance, squashed.

So, when I was recently invited to speak at a rather jumpy Pentecostal church, I kept my composure.

When the church band struck up a jazzy song called Die Engele Roer Die Bad, my toes twitched but I would not budge.

However, when the lead singers hit the refrain, Spring in, Spring in, I could no longer contain myself and joined the snaking group of worshippers running along the inside of the church.

I had to unlearn a serious inhibition and discover the freedom of spontaneous (if awkward, in my case) dancing.

I was taught to be a religious bigot.

Everybody was going to hell except the Brethren who by some miracle got the interpretation of the Bible dead right.

Well, not everybody but certainly the Catholics and the Anglicans who were not born again and baptised as adults.

So, when I was asked to address Anglican parishioners at Christ Church Constantia, I started by telling them that my father was also Anglican before he found Jesus.

There was nervous laughter in the pews.

Where was this message going?

Halfway through my sermon (it was a conversation with this church community, more accurately) I apologised to the Anglicans for the narrowness and meanness of my faith.

I had to relearn how to love and embrace those who believed differently from me.

After my talk the Anglicans went forward by row to kneel on a bench with pillows running in a semicircle around the pulpit.

Each group coming forward would in that kneeling position received the holy sacraments, bread and wine.

I could not go. In my church upbringing, you had to meet a high threshold for holiness to ‘break bread’ on a Sunday morning.

I felt that I did not meet that standard given my rather imperfect life.

At that moment, one of the groups that passed by me in the front row included a young man who had Down syndrome.

He went to kneel to the left of the pulpit to pray and receive communion and then return to his seat.

Then it struck me.

This courageous youth would in the estimation of others also be deemed imperfect and yet to me he was the perfect soul. Church was for people like us.

At that moment I decided to take communion.

I went to kneel exactly where he did and as I prayed I heard the words of the priest, ‘Prof, the body of Christ.’

I had seldom felt so blessed in my life.

I wish you an uplifting 2024.

For you to get the most out of the year, you too might have to learn, unlearn and relearn what you have been taught.

The future belongs to those kinds of learners, said the writer and businessman Alvin Toffler.

I encourage you to throw off your inhibitions and to let yourself go.

Dance as if nobody cares. Embrace your imperfect self.

And love across the artificial borders that separate us such as race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality and national origins.

Of course, school education is important and passing the matric examinations well might get you into higher education and a good job.

But as I reflect on my imperfect life, I realise more and more that some of the most powerful lessons learnt were gained outside the classroom.

To get the most from your out-of-school learning you must learn one other skill: the ability to pay attention.

We are always learning something new from things around us, but you may miss that learning in the rush of everyday life.

Or, tragedy of tragedies, you might think you already know everything.

Pay attention to things around you like the young man passing by with Down syndrome so that you learn to see perfection where others do not.

Now that is an education worth pursuing.