Twenty-five years after matric, visiting a secondary school is like going to another planet, with the alien experience already starting at the main gate.
Manning the entrance are armed security guards for whom having a child somewhere inside, does not constitute a good enough reason to allow you access.
I’m not sure whether they are there to protect the pupils against society, or society against the pupils.
It might be a bit of both, because I’ve noticed even the children are being searched before they are allowed inside.
And when you finally manage to convince Idi Amin that you’re not there to sell peanut butter and heroin sandwiches, don’t think the first man with a full beard you come across is the deputy principal.
I made that mistake recently.
At least Freddy Mercury was polite and told me he doesn’t have time to show me where the main office building is because he’s late for Grade 10 hospitality studies and has to go learn to make fudge.
But before that I had to find parking inside the school yard, and that was also quite a problem because seeing that pupils’ cars outnumber teachers’ cars by far, there’s not a lot of open space in a school parking lot nowadays.
And their cars are often a lot more flashy than those of their educators. Just the other day I even saw a BMW M5 packed with five boys each puffing away on a Stuyvesant.
Shooting class
Twenty-five years ago things were different – a lot different!
There were no security guards because nobody ever took their father’s .44 Magnum to school, and the only men with facial hair were the teachers.
They were also the only ones older than 19.
In matric only three pupils came to school driving their own cars, of which two had engines.
Adolf Koekemoer, a matric who lived almost right across from the main gate, rounded up a group of young boys every morning to push his engineless Beetle into the school yard.
When one boy complained to a teacher he was told to suck it up because it builds character.
Everybody else either cycled to school or walked, except for Gertjie Fourie, who lived on a farm and came to school on a horse.
The animal used to wander about the yard as it pleased, but after it bit an eighth grader, Gert was told to stable it inside the shooting range.
Yes, back then all high schools had shooting ranges and shooting was considered as a sport, something I wouldn’t recommend today.
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