For whom the bell tolls… not any more
OUTGOING Chelsea Preparatory School principal Clive Nel will have to adapt to a new way of life from the end of the year.
And he won’t be living by the bell. “My entire life has operated according to the school bell,” he told The Independent on Saturday.
After 27 years at the Durban North school, he will have a transition period next year as he starts his retirement.
One of his responsibilities will be to watch over the construction of the new school hall. The bell will be only background noise.
“We’ve always been good with our forward planning. With every board we’ve looked forward with five-year plans.”
When Nel arrived at the school it was a senior primary institution and the buildings were half-empty. Today, it has a junior primary school on a separate campus and every July all places for the following year are filled, Nel said.
Although it’s a state school, it’s “as close as you can get to a private school”.
That goes with the territory in keeping it a school serving Durban North but it has its challenges, he said.
He believes consulting on issues is the best way to deal with them. “These days, you’ve got to be emotionally and politically sensitive.”
“We’re competing with private schools. It makes the school like a bubble with privileges such as children in grades 6 and 7 having tablets and access to wi-fi. This isn’t the norm.”
Nel stressed that running a school was like running a business, accepting the market – the parents – for what it is.
“The reality is that unless you’re a good sporting school, you won’t attract parents who can pay your fees.”
Nel has seen a number of transitions in the decades in which he has been in education: apartheid to democracy, old school to new, his transfer from rural schools in Zululand to urban Durban and bells modernising from brass to electric.
The political transition has meant access to Chelsea for the significant Indian component in the pupil body, along with other black communities. It was a white school pre-1994.
He believes consulting on issues is the best way to deal with them.
On old school ways to new ways, Nel has spent the twilight years of his career questioning the relevance of “values we tried so hard to retain” and whether what’s more relevant is not perhaps “being sensible and having common sense”.
Among the old values was an insistence that rugby boots at Chelsea had to be black and if they had a white stripe on, they had to be filled in with a koki pen.
“Now multi-coloured shoes appear on the field and standards have not changed.”
He also said younger teachers were entering education with very different attitudes, using just-issued iPads as an example.
“(As a young teacher) I once wanted a tape recorder and had to sell jaffles for ages. They didn’t just give you things. We would use our own cars and there was no such thing as claiming for petrol. You never thought to ask. To the new generation this is a job and you must provide things to them.”
Parents had also changed, he said.
They often both work, or are single parents who work and have less time for school community activities such as volunteering at cake sales and other fund raisers.
This impacts on the community feeling at schools and they can often be ready to attack teachers over issues.
To adapt to the working-parents era, Nel believes schools are going to have to provide more after-care.
Comparing Durban North with his experiences in Melmoth and Mtubatuba, as well as his own education at Estcourt High, Nel said urban education was more demanding.
“I can’t believe how many people are needed to coach a rugby team. In Melmoth, we had a coach for a group of boys who made up the first, second and everything team. They played for the firsts, then regrouped and played a second match for the seconds.
“Today, I have a coach, a backline coach and a coach supervisor.”
He said sex education in the city caused giggles in class: in rural schools “they’ve seen it all in the fields”.
His education at Estcourt saw him fatten cattle for a stock sale as part of agricultural studies, which he took as a subject.
“You’d get quite fond of them, then on Saturday you saw their carcasses in the butcher’s window, but nobody even blinked.”
That would not go down in an urban setting, he said.
Nel said he had chosen primary school teaching because, when he started training at the then-Edgewood College of Education (now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal), he was straight out of school and didn’t like the idea of teaching youngsters almost his own age.
While he looks forward to eventually breathing in the cool Midlands air he grew up in – and free from the school bell – Nel said teaching was a joy and he could carry on doing it until he was 95.
“But they (the department of education) say I must stop at 65.”