Boys school old boys are special

 

There are those who will tell you that there’s really no room for a monastic, boarding school education in the 21^st Century. That schools like that are founded on an educational philosophy that is outdated and irrelevant, and morally dodgy.

They’ll point out that there are many types of schools, and that our “old English” education-type institutions aren’t the only ones that produce good sports results, and send successful adults out into the world, and of course they are right.

But there is something about those schools, and it goes beyond the boys buttoning up their blazers on a hot day, and greeting every adult they come across – and at at those sorts of schools they are somehow all taught to do that.

There seems to be among their alumni a loyalty and attachment to the place they grew up in that goes beyond that of those who were schooled somewhere else.

If you doubt that, go to one of the Easter rugby festivals that are on the go at the moment.

I was at King Edward on Saturday and, like everywhere else, the rain was bucketing down, and it was cold, and there are no covered stands to watch the action from. It was the sort of Saturday when you say at home and watch sport on the TV and, this year you could watch your old school play via the live streaming that SuperSport Schools has laid on. Many did that, I guess, and the numbers at KES were down on the average for Saturday that has come along through the years.

It was pretty quiet early on – when it wasn’t raining all that hard, actually – but by the time the last three games of the day came around the stands were pretty full. And guess which schools featured in those games? Queen's College, Jeppe, Dale and KES.

The families of the players were there, they always are, and there will have been some current pupils in the stands. During the KES game the schoolboys were out in force, in school uniform, singing their songs in the downpour until well after the final whistle, and that’s a different, amazing story. 

A fair proportion of the crowd, however, was made up of the old boys of those schools. Their school days are over and they have other things they have to do, but they were there to support their alma maters. That’s become something of a tradition at these Joburg Easter festivals, and it has a lot to do with arranging to meet old mates in the beer tent before and after the game. But there isn’t a beer tent that is open all day at KES this year.

Yet they left their warm, dry homes, negotiated the traffic, parked quite far away, walked through the puddles, and stood on the stands in the teeming rain, singing the old songs, and chanting the old chants. Most of them were hostel boys, I’d wager, and all of them were boys' school boys. They were telling themselves, I’m sure, what’s a little rain?

Those critics of boys-only boarding schools will tell you it doesn’t really mean much, and it’s a little borderline crazy, and the wives and girlfriends, who decided to stay at home – those who would have been invited to come along in the first place – were probably wondering again what they had let themselves in for. But I liked it. 

Those old boys singing in the rain was one of the highlights of a day that was pretty special in many ways. I’m glad I was there.