University visit gives pupils hope to move beyond circumstances

I invited about 130 grade 12 pupils from a Cape Flats school to spend time on a university campus this week. These young people were super excited and so, I discovered, were their parents.

Studying at Stellenbosch University, or any higher education institution, was not high on their agendas. The aspirational goals you set for yourself are circumscribed by your surrounding environment.

In the case of many of these wonderful pupils, that often means working-class parents, absentee fathers, abusive stepparents, and sometimes a father in prison or a mother on drugs. Nobody you know went to university.

“I sleep on the floor,” one troubled youngster told me, “so that my siblings can sleep on the bed.” Aspirations are low, and understandably so.

We arranged for a cross-section of Stellenbosch students to form a panel to speak to the high school visitors about what it means to study at a university, and to answer questions.

Then something moving happened. One of the students said: “I have finished my master’s degree at Stellenbosch; I have travelled to five continents including Antarctica….and I’m from Delft.”

A loud groan of surprise went up from the audience. What? From Delft?

Just to be clear, this is not the canal-ringed city in the western Netherlands.

No, this Delft — and the visiting pupils knew this — is one of the most derelict, downtrodden and dangerous areas of the Cape Flats.

Delft is where you go when you’re feeling suicidal: you go in from one side, off Hindle Road and there is no guarantee you will emerge from the other side of this depressing place.

One online entry calls our Delft “officially the murder capital of the country”.

“And I’m from Delft” carried such a powerful message to the high schoolers: If she can make it, I can make it.

Nothing good comes out of Delft might be the assumption, but given the opportunity, there is absolutely no difference in the potential of young people whether they are from Bishopscourt or Bishop Lavis. No difference.

As these pupils moved through the amply stocked university library, across campus facilities, through the impressive student centre called The Neelsie, and down the long tree-lined streets, they could begin lifting their sights beyond what is familiar.

Throughout the day, those words kept ringing in my ear: “And I’m from Delft.”

This is something every South African can do. Take a child to the local aquarium who would never be able to afford the expensive ticket.

Take a group of high schoolers on a guided tour of a local museum. Take children who had never seen the ocean on a visit to the beach this coming holiday before the weather gets too cold. What you are doing is un-Delfting them, giving them a sense of a world they would not otherwise imagine.

Education, if anything, is to re-set the imaginations of the poor and working-class youth so that they too can see what is possible if we, the adults, carve for them a possible path out of poverty. It’s not what’s in their pockets that will make a difference; it is what’s in their heads.

One of my mentors, Professor Barney Pityana, said something striking this week concerning university leadership, on a panel that we co-chaired.

“The university is not there merely to reflect society,” that silly little gaffe from race traders when they talk about equity and representation in such reductive terms.

“The university is there to reimagine society.”

I like that very much otherwise we simply reproduce privileges for the few among the black and white middle classes.

We also need to reimagine the university for those who do not have this prized institution in their sights.

An impressive undergraduate engineering student on the panel said, in response to a question about entrance requirements, that the maths average required was something like 70%. Another audible groan from the pupils.

This was countercultural for the campus visitors, having long acclimatised themselves to the 30% and 40% pass percentage in our schools.

But, said the black woman from engineering, I had to work hard and spend an extra year or two while my fellow students graduated but now I am on course to succeed.

Delft, in a manner of speaking, did not keep her down.

If you lift the aspirations of students, and give them structured opportunities, they will succeed and their Delfts will become their distinctions.