BlankMorning all I know the list has been very quiet but I have just been so busy I don't know whether I am Arthur or Martha. I thought I would send some interesting snippets to the list on the History of A few schools and have started off with Wynberg Boys High. If you have any interesting information to add please feel free too. By the way if anyone has ever come across the MCNAUGHTON family of Wynberg I would be very interested to hear from you. John McNaughton was a teacher and Principal at Wynberg from 1841 until 1863 when he went on Pension. The Background PIETER VAN DER STAEL, the official sick-comforter, stood in the loft of one of the Dutch East India Company’s buildings at the Cape and surveyed the deserted schoolroom scene before him. By virtue of his office he had been set in authority over a group of West African slaves and charged with their instruction in the rudiments of learning. As he did not speak their language and had had no previous teaching experience, the project was daunting enough. When, however, his charges had failed to appear for lessons on five consecutive days, and no whisper had been heard of their whereabouts, he had cause to feel disconsolate. The best he could have hoped for as he stood there was to be returned to Holland; the worst, deportation to Batavia. Fortunately for Pieter van der Stael, the Commander, his brother-in-law, took a lenient view of the situation when the entire class was found hiding in a cave at Hout Bay. Instead of being deported, van der Stael was encouraged to introduce a system of rewards as an aid to teaching. The recalcitrants were accordingly welcomed back to the fold with promises of a tot of rum and three inches of tobacco, whenever they displayed diligence in their work. It says a great deal for the wisdom of van Riebeeck that he should have condoned the action of his bondsmen in deliberately thwarting his plans. It says even more for his foresight that he should have considered the education of the aboriginals before the European youth of the settlement, now in the fifth year of its existence. Unfortunately, his plans went awry. The excessive formalism of the D .E.I .Co’s educational policy, which sought to make of every pupil a good Calvinist, and approached the three R’s merely as a means to this end, was not congenial to a class of illiterate slaves. Despite the saporific inducements to study held out by their schoolmaster, they continued to play truant whenever the opportunity arose. For three more weeks van der Stael played catch-as-catch-can with his pupils, at which stage Jan van Riebeeck’s patience was exhausted. He closed the school. The closing of the first school on the shores of Table Bay was a rebuff for its instigator. He was not to know that his failure was only a minor prelude to the many and more bitter failures that were to attend the establishment of a complete system of education in the country. The building up of any educational scheme is of necessity an experimental and eclectic process accompanied by many high hopes and frustrations. In South Africa with its multi-racial and multilingual problems, the process was so much more complicated, that the disappointments were necessarily more frequent and more acute. The enigma of education in this country is not that a national system has still to be accepted by the legislators of the land. The wonder is that education has attained its present high standard at the Provincial organization level. America excepted, no other country in the world has had to contend with so many vicissitudes in working out a common factor for the training of its youth. In 1663 a second school was opened at the Cape. Of the seventeen children enrolled, four were slaves, one a young Hottentot, and the remaining twelve were Europeans. Once again religious instruction took precedence over learning to read and write, and, as an experiment, fees were levied for instruction. The same loft was commissioned as a school room, Ernestus Back was installed as the teacher, and the Company awaited results. This time an impish fate did a complete somersault: it was the tutor not the tutored who transgressed. Mr. Back found more solace in wine than in wisdom. Heed less of numerous warnings, he conducted his lessons and his services while deep in his cups, and on one occasion when his congregation took the action denied his pupils and hastily withdrew from his inebriated orations, the Company was compelled to suspend him forthwith. When subsequently a comet appeared over the mountain every night for two months, officialdom took this as a sign of the Almighty’s disapproval, and the was placed on the first ship bound for Batavia. The school continued to function and a certain Daniel Engelgraeff was appointed to succeed Ernestus Back. He had little to recommend his appointment, save that he was a well- behaved soldier who had impressed the authorities with his steadiness and his application. Nevertheless, until his death Engelgraeff served his school adequately, and his name has come down in history as the doyen of a long line of quasi-schoolmasters who have been designated ‘itinerant’ or ‘vagabond’ teachers. This type of school could cater for the elementary needs of the town. But what of the country? Unable to send their children to the official schools, whether by virtue of the distance entailed or the cost incurred, the farmers in the out lying districts were determined that their children should acquire sufficient learning to enable them to read the Bible and write a letter. So several families would club together to hire the services of a schoolmaster for a period of six months or a year. In this way many discharged officials of the Company were employed to bring the elements of knowledge to the youth of the rural districts. Regrettably for the country, too many of these itinerant teachers were charlatans and adventurers who would have been more advantageously employed as hewers of wood or drawers of water. Possessing only a nodding acquaintance with reading and writing, these so-called educators soon brought the whole teaching profession into disrepute. So serious did the position become that Governor van Imhoff in 1745 forbade discharged servants of the Company to take service in the districts as private tutors. In 1779 the licensed schoolmasters in Cape Town addressed a petition to van Plettenberg in which they complained that numbers of their pupils were being drawn away from their official schools by unlicensed rivals, and in 1788 an observer reported ‘that several of these supposed masters . . . are with out knowledge, without manners, who torment children with out teaching them anything useful, or, what is worse, teach them evil things’ The Dutch East India Company was fully aware of the sad state of educational affairs, but was powerless to improve conditions. There were too few ‘sieckentroosters’ to go round the larger communities, let alone cater for the needs of the pastoral constituencies. The pioneering nature of the rural population had carried them beyond the Gamtoos River, to the Uitenhage district of today, making supervision and control of their educational needs a physical as well as a practical impossibility. Above all other considerations, the Company, even had it had the forethought to procure or train teachers, lacked the financial resources to cater for the schooling of one-tenth of the youth of the Colony In this quandary, the Church stepped into the breach, and, due to its zeal, more and more schools were opened. One day the full story of the contribution made to South African education by the Dutch Reformed Church will be written. It will be a saga of dedication, patience and endurance. In Cape Town in 1779 there was a school for Coloured children, and an infant school, in addition to the eight public elementary schools, while in Stellenbosch, Paarl, Malmesbury, Tulbagh, Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet, schools may be presumed to have been functioning under the auspices of the churches in those areas. A high school was started under Midshipman Slicher who gave instruction in Latin and Dutch, and catered for boarding pupils. At Stellenbosch the present- day Cadet Corps were foreshadowed by the drilling of all boys over the age of 9 years. Every Saturday the recruits would parade, and whenever the Governor visited the town his carriage was escorted by the juvenile corps. The Company, although financially impotent, did make some attempts to co-ordinate and control the pattern of private education which had unravelled under its jurisdiction, but without its assistance. In 1714, and again in 1743 and 1769, ordinances were passed regulating the behaviour in and out of school, the number of holidays to be enjoyed and the competence of the schoolmasters in the larger centres. The officials kept a careful check on the hours given over to religious instruction, and through the ‘scholarchen’ or supervisors of schools, they did examine the qualifications of potential teachers. As always in the growth of any educational system, there were troubles within the camp from freethinkers. In 1719 a Papist schoolmaster was indicted as a ‘God-dishonouring creature’. He declared publicly that he did not believe in the Flood, the Ark or the Miracles of Moses. Although the senior clergyman remonstrated with him, he continued to teach his own particular brand of heresy. In a Calvinist stronghold, the result of this indiscretion was a foregone conclusion. The gentleman in question was deported. Then too, as now, salaries were a meagre pittance, designed more to keep up appearances than to attract men of character and qualifications. The schoolmaster had, therefore, to take on extra jobs to make ends meet. The Company was well aware of this practice, and, provided that the teacher restricted himself to the hours before school commenced in the morning, raised no objections to his part-time labours. Indeed, on one occasion an official list of tasks which a schoolmaster might legally carry out for private gain was published. Subject only to the restriction placed upon his hours of work, the teacher could be: a notary, a tax collector, a secretary; a hairdresser, a curer of wounds, a glazier; a maker of balls, coffins; a cutter of stone, a varnisher of chairs and mender of shoes; a com poser of love letters. Naturally enough, education under the Dutch East India Company left a great deal to be desired. ‘Our youth’, wrote an official in 1791, ‘can scarcely do spelling, reading, writing and elementals in Arithmetic: not to mention singing and truths of Holy Religion.’ On the other hand, it is questionable whether the children of the time required any more advanced training to fit them for the pioneer life of the Cape. More over, in proportion to the population, the burghers were as well educated as the people in most European countries at that time. At this point in the history of our education, a gentle breeze from the winds of liberalism which were blowing strongly all over Western Europe reached the Cape. In 1802 the Treaty of Amiens was signed and the Cape retroceded to the Batavian Republic which had superseded the monarchy in Holland. For a short time this zephyr caused the flickering light of learning to be fanned into a bright flame. In 1803 Commissioner-General de Mist, in anticipation of the formal act of retrocession, arrived in Table Bay, entrusted with the task of drawing up a plan of government to be implemented by Governor Janssens. Jacob Abraham Uitenhage de Mist was enlightened far beyond his age, and in his perspective on education he has outstripped many of his modern proto types. Acting on the guiding principle that education was a national not a parochial or haphazard concern, he immediately divorced the control of schools from the churches and the scholarchen, and married it to a Board of Education under the direct aegis of the Governor. To this central authority the landdrosts and ministers of the country districts were affiliated as honorary members. In this way administrative control of the entire country was ensured. Then, in order to guarantee that there were sufficient funds to carry out his further designs, de Mist ordained that the privileged people should contribute directly and indirectly to the Treasury. All landowners were required to pay a school contribution not exceeding ?2 5s. per annum, and numerous taxes were levied on amusement, vehicles and inheritances. Upon this broad base of a well-financed, completely co-ordinated, national plan of education, the Commissioner set to work to construct the pillars and walls of his educational edifice. A training school for teachers was to be staffed with experienced men from Holland. All un-certificated teachers were warned that after a period of five years, they would no longer be allowed to instruct the youth at the Cape. The syllabus was completely revised and took on a secular aspect, although religious instruction was not forgotten. Into the position of the coping stone, de Mist raised the invaluable provision that no person at the Cape would be appointed to a post commanding a salary of more than ?200 p.a. who had not passed creditably through the highest class of a Latin, that is a secondary, school. The incandescence of the brave, new educational policy was destined not to pierce the cultural darkness of the land; the rays were obfuscated by the megalomania of Europe’s first little corporal. The swift success of Napoleon in Europe after the temporary respite of Amiens forced the British Government to think once again of its Eastern possessions. Should the self-crowned Emperor ever occupy the Cape, he would be well on his way towards a conquest of India and the realization of his dreams of global power. The British Secretary of State for War, Lord Castlereagh, had no alternative. Under the protection of the Red Ensign, he dispatched a task force to occupy the Cape. The superiority in numbers of the attackers, a sharp skirmish or two, and a classical bayonet charge by the Highland Brigade convinced Governor Janssens of the futility of further, resistance. On 18 January 1806 the regime of the Batavian Republic at the Cape ceased to be, and de Mist’s blueprint for education was buried under the litter swept from the Castle by its new occupants. The first decade of the second British occupation of the Cape was, educationally speaking, as gloomy and forbidding as the years of the Republic had seemed bright and encouraging. It was not to be expected that the British governors at that time would embrace the liberal legislation of de Mist, when England itself had to wait until 1863 for its myopic educationists to accept any revolutionary principles of education. But, it might have been supposed that the governors would do something to improve upon the system of education popular in the days of the Dutch East India Company. They did not. The ‘meesters’ reappeared like an allergic rash, control was as haphazard as ever, and apart from a desultory attempt on the part of Sir John Cradock to encourage the use of church clerks as schoolmasters, education was virtually left to fend for itself. The result was fifteen years of mental stagnation and retrogression. kind regards Heather Heather's South African Genealogy Help List www.genealogy.co.za The 1902 Municipal Voters Roll of Cape Town - Districts 1 to 6 The 1878 Voters Roll for the Cape is now available with tens of thousands on names !!! 1805, 1829, 1835 and 1849 Cape Almanacs now on CD The Juta's Directory of 1900 which lists residents of Cape Town from the City Bowl until Simonstown. To view our catalogue go to www.genealogy.co.za/scribes.html Cape Town Family History Society www.genealogy.co.za/socweb.html