HNBHS: INSTEAD OF HAVING MORE GOOD SCHOOLS, WE NOW HAVE ONE LESS

Your story about the transformation of Highlands North Boys High School (HNBHS) highlights how far our understanding of “transformation” as a societal imperative has corrupted in the past two decades. The school’s governing body chair Riccardo Houghton contradicts himself when he concedes that in 2003 the school “represented SA and our diverse culture” and “no one cared about the colour of your skin”. But clearly this was not enough.

So what lies behind this corruption of intent? The answer appears later when Houghton declares that the “school’s demographics have changed for the better”. This is the fundamental point buried in many school transformation charters – that transformation is today only and narrowly measured in demography. And that it is absolute inasmuch as the more black the school is the more transformed it is. This is immutable. Presumably HNBHS is fully and successfully transformed. The flight of the final white families from the school, an absolutely inevitable outcome once the school’s demographics tipped past a certain point, and which could easily have been foreseen given the many examples recorded in the US, SA and elsewhere, was obviously waved off.

How this transformation can be touted as a success requires a deliberate suspension of disbelief. The school is “unable to maintain some of its operational costs that sometimes include paying educators”. The school has “closed its swimming pool”, its “wall paint is peeling”, the inside is “falling apart”, the hostel is “closed and cordoned off”, and proudly, not only is the fee “somewhat affordable” at R13,500pa, only half the learners’ families pay it!

The school is now completely disconnected from its suburb. Headmaster Mike Masinge proudly informs us that “we are not servicing learners from Highlands”, in effect confirming that this school is a black island in a suburb it has no link to. This means that boys have to travel distances to get to the school, some from Soweto and the Vaal, and this has a devastating effect on sporting and other cultural activities that are so part of the life of “good” schools.

So HNBHS has driven its transformation in narrow demographic terms. Inevitably its governing body and the policies it has implemented have weeded out and finally excluded the last white kids from the surrounding areas. The same governing body has deliberately starved the school of funding by artificially keeping fees lower than they need to be for the school to be maintained let alone to grow or improve; they continue to allow the school to therefore deteriorate.

What an unholy mess! This is not a “new beginning” that “falters”, but rather one that never began, because the departure point was ideologically exclusionary and totally disconnected from the economic reality of why a “good” school is in fact “good”. We have not advanced our education challenge in SA one bit here. We need more good Highlands schools, many many more, but we now, emphatically, have one less.