I see The Man Who Would Have Been DVC at UCT - only he went north, and became a VC - not only didn't give up his plog (=paper blog, aka The Times column), but now calls for...nuns?!...yes, actual penguins!, to rescue South Africa's ailing school system.

All across the land, I hear the despairing cry, of "Oh, please, for pity's sake, nooooooo...!"

You see, while J Jansen esq - for it is he who plogs thus - thinks a good dose of nunning would stiffen the moral fibres and backbones of the sullen mob of under-educated and under-achieving children that are our learner cohort, because such treatment worked wonders for all of the well-educated Zimbabweans who flock south and make bead ornaments instead of being allowed to teach our children, he gets the wrong end of the stick to some extent.

As did many, many of us who WERE nunned, in the lands to the north.

You see, the reason that many of us-who-were-trained-by-religious-and-especially-by-penguins over-achieve and do well, is because the nuns are behind us.

ALL THE TIME.

With a thick 30 cm ruler.  Waiting, waiting for the infraction - real or imagined; these are one to the nun - so that she can leap into view, ruler upraised, ready to strike at the trembling fingers.

Oh, I exaggerate - well, a little, anyway - but as anyone who survived went through the Dominican Convent Schools of Salisbury/Harare or Lusaka can attest, the German Dominicans should more properly have been called The Little Sisters of Perpetual Torment, and it takes many, many years to forget some of the petty cruelties and arbitrary punishments.  And then you get early arthritis in the fingers.  I only suffered nuns by proxy, as it were - my sister and my wife were at the Lusaka Convent - but I was welcomed to kindergarten in Lusaka by a Sister Mary Pia, who kept popping up throughout my schooling, and has haunted my dreams since I was five.

For the nuns stay with you...always over the shoulder out of sight; always about to berate you for your stupidity - and the ruler, always the ruler, always there....

So we may achieve, we the nun-schooled ones; we may do well - but we do it out of neurosis and guilt, more for fear of the Wrath of a Small Nun and The Ruler, than for ourselves.

I give to you,then, as learned in religious schools, the principle of Pre-Emptive Guilt Installation as a teaching tool: make the learning recipient guilty right up front, and they are yours for life.  And they'll always double-check the centrifuge door; always check AGAIN before throwing the switch that sets amps coursing through gels; always check the lights are off and the doors are locked...because YOU are standing behind them.  Forever....

So, Professor Jansen: do you want neurotic, over-achieving well-educated-but-damaged school graduates that nuns would give us?  Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you want the happy, well-adjusted, low-achieving products of the Waldorf and Steiner schools of the leafy suburbs?  I have chosen the safe middle way for my children: gentle Anglicans for one, and a good government school for the other (no, not SACS or Rondebosch or Westerford).  No overt religion, no guilt, no jockism, and no single-sex dysfunction incubators for the Retroid children!

Because I still dream of what happens when you stumble over the conjugation of "pouvoir", or what happened at the Council of Trent - and my back doesn't work properly because of rugby.  And I am an atheist because (partly, anyway) I went to schools called St Augustine's Abbey School (Benedictine monks), St Francis College (Franciscan friars), and St George's College (Jesuits).

So no, Professor Jansen, no nuns: what we need instead is what the mission and other schools gave Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe - which was a cohort of well-trained, literate, motivated teachers, who educated people well, even in rural mission-school contexts.  At UCT we have gone seamlessly in the last thirty+ years from well-educated white Rhodesians coming first in everything, to well-educated Zimbabweans coming first in everything - who come from schools that didn't even exist in the 1980s, which gives the lie to Jansen's comments that the Smith regime killed the schools.  And consider: these are the kids who didn't get into the University of Zimbabwe, whose entrance requirements are still FAR stiffer than any SA University.

More Zimbabweans, Professor Jansen - not nuns.  Please, no nuns....