After the Bell: What is it with our middle-class school obsession?

I wonder how many times you’ve been asked, “Where did you go to school”, or “Where are your children at school?”

If my answer to either of those questions was “Bishops”, you’d know it already…

I have lost count of how many times I’ve been asked one of those questions by other middle-class South Africans. And how many times I’ve asked the question myself.

A friend of a friend who lives in the UK told me recently that when they were planning their holiday here, her British husband remarked that he would spend his December listening to middle-aged people asking each other what school they had gone to.

I am absolutely guilty of this.

I have school-age children and this has perhaps made my recent conversations around schools particularly acute.

But even professionally, when talking to people I’ve just met, or filling the time waiting for an interview or a meeting to start, the conversation will almost automatically get around to it.

I’m lucky enough to spend some Saturday mornings at my son’s school, talking to other fathers who I often haven’t met before. And, inevitably, either they or I will bring the conversation around to schools. 

It often starts with someone asking where my daughter is, or where my children went to primary school, and moves on to where I went. (If you are curious, my school was and is a government school, a very strong rugby school and an exceptional cricket school… with a motto demanding that we use all our strength.)

I don’t think other societies, or even the middle classes of other societies, have this school obsession. Or, at least, not to the extent that we do. 

I mean, is it that common for school rugby matches to be broadcast on TV in other places?

But I do wonder if this obsession with “which school” is about something else.

Many of us like to try to understand a person we are talking to, a person we have just met. We want to know more about them. We often want to place them in our context. 

There is a useful phrase to describe all of this. It’s often referred to as “class”. 

I sometimes wonder if this is particularly acute in South Africa because we live in such a diverse country. And for a very large group of people, there has been just the most amazing and impressive upward social mobility in a very short space of time.

Recently, I was at an Open Day of what can only be described as a mind-blowingly expensive girls’ school in Joburg. I asked another dad if he had gone to a school like this.

The main reason I asked is because I knew the answer would tell me a lot about him.

His reply, that “No ways, I went to school in Alex”, told me so much. He had been born with much less than I, he had clearly worked his way up impressively and he was taking his daughter’s education very, very seriously.

It told me that this was someone who deserved immense respect.

I think this can also feed back into the discussions parents have about which school to send their children to.

The intensity of schools is perpetuated from generations past. There is often pressure on parents to send their children to schools they went to; a school can almost be a “family school” in some ways. Someone once introduced me to their great-grandson, who was at the same preparatory school he had gone to. Along with his son and his grandson (it was also the same school I went to).

And the needs of the child can be easily forgotten in these discussions.

At the same time, the decisions around where to send your child, if you are lucky enough to have the means to choose, is so often about your own perception of your own class.

It is about your own identity, both where you see yourself at present and your aspirations for your child. People can dream of having a son or a daughter because they might one day be wearing the uniform of this school or that school.

There is certainly something very sexist about all of this.

Years ago, someone brought out a beautiful book titled The Historic Schools of South Africa.

It contained a grand total of 0 (for the removal of doubt “zero”) girls’ schools.

At an Open Day for a government girls’ school recently, someone remarked to me that there was a major difference between this school and the school I had gone to.

The school I went to has benefitted from old boys donating money, sometimes when they are alive and sometimes in their wills.

It would appear very few girls’ schools benefit in this way. 

The most likely reason is not that women feel weaker ties with their schools, but simply because there are probably more rich men than rich women in our society.  I hope that you will comment below and let me know what you think, and if our obsession will ever change.

And I will probably want to know, “Which school did you go to?” DM