Jenny Lea, Fish Hoek
In my experience children can often be unwittingly cruel to one another (“Furore after diversity training at Fish Hoek High School,” Echo November 10).
I shall quote two instances from my own school days (which were very long ago). One day, early in Grade 1, I was astonished when a bunch of kids started pointing and chanting at a little girl called Valerie Jones. “Valerie Jones broke her bones by falling over cherry stones!” they yelled. I did not understand what was going on.
The next day, when the kids started shouting this ridiculous, meaningless verse, she loudly responded, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but never a word can harm me!” Was that something her parents had taught her to say? At any rate, the other kids stopped teasing her.
The other thing happened right at the beginning of my high school career. When our class jostled out at the bell for playtime, one of the girls gave the order to run away from our classmate, Janet. She couldn’t run herself as she had a foot injury. I didn’t know why we were supposed to run away from her. I heard someone say, disparagingly, “She talks with such a posh accent.” (Our school was in Pretoria, where people speak with a “plat” Pretoria accent. It’s even a bit different from the Cape Town English accent.)
I thought my classmate’s remark was quite peculiar and did not make sense. I stayed behind and fell in step with Janet, and we became friends.
I think young human beings have a sort of instinct to somehow bully someone in the group who is different, or just because they think it’s funny. But, of course, they hopefully learn over time, one way or another, that it can be unkind, and the kids who were taunted or bullied can hopefully learn to take no notice or to think of an aptly funny or silly response.
I so much wish that kids could have a much broader education than what I suspect they do at this time. Could they not be encouraged to discover what is actually meant by the term “race”? Is it simply skin colour, the amount of a certain pigment in the skin? Physical characteristics, such as hair, eye colour, physical shape? Religion? Language? Cultural habits?
I was lucky enough to attend a private high school where we were given a broader view of history over and above the syllabus, which at that time seemed to focus ad nauseam on the Great Trek.
Since then, I have been lucky enough to have had experiences with many other people from different cultures and have read books delving into the phenomenon of migration – why and how human beings have been migrating all over the planet since the dawn of humanity.
I have learnt how religions evolved in different parts of the world, through the centuries and millennia. I have delighted in finding out how languages have evolved through time and from place to place. And what about all the hundreds of physical attributes that go towards defining “race”? We were taught about genes in high school biology. How a bean plant with red flowers pollinated with one with white flowers will produce pink flowers, as well as pure white or red. How two white people, both born of white parents, can produce an obviously “coloured” child (like Sandra Laing, of the Skin story), and hundreds, probably thousands of other different permutations, not only of skin colour but of hundreds and thousands of different physical characteristics.
I think DNA testing is great: it can tell us so much about our physical ancestors for one thing, apart from all the stuff people can learn about diseases.
I do believe that most people prefer to live in peace with others and should be taught how. And I do believe that words can hurt, as well as inspire people. I can and still do sometimes feel hurt when someone says something a bit unkind to or about me, but it does help me to think of Valerie Jones: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but never a word can harm me.”
Words are wonderful, we would not be human beings without them, but it’s a good idea to use them with care.
