WHEN
CHILDREN WERE STILL CHILDREN
A SKETCH
FROM THE LIFE OF STES DE NECKER
Stes de Necker
One of the most tragic consequences of our
so-called modern society is the fact that most of today’s youngsters have never
learned how to play.
Today, every spare moment is spend chatting
and texting on Blackberries, I-phones, Facebook, Twitter and what else. Grade 1
children are today learning what we learned in high school fifty years ago. It’s
all about performance. Performance in the classroom, performance on cultural
level and performance on the sports field.
I grew up on a farm and usually there were
never enough hours in a day or on weekends and not even holidays to do
everything we wanted to do. Together with my farm friends, children of the farm
workers, we went horse riding, donkey riding, building rafts to sail on the
dam, catapult shooting, played marbles, making clay ‘sculptures’ and playing
Tarzan. The school holidays were all too short, not to speak about weekends.
Those wicked Mondays. After a weekend it
was back to boarding school. Back to the deadly routine of getting up,
breakfast, school, lunch, study, sports, dinner, study, bedtime. And all that while
the desperate longing back to the farm and your playmates never leave you for
one moment.
If anyone were to ask me today what my
marks in primary school were, I will not be able to remember it to save my
life!
Because it was not important!
Of interest was to grow up a normal human
being. To learn through play. To learn mutual respect and acceptance with your
friends of different colour. To learn respect for your elders. To learn why dad
has given you the hiding of your life because you called “Outa Jan” by his
first name and not “outa” out of respect for his age and respect for his
position as foreman on the farm.
To learn about nature and to be able to figure
out for yourself if there was rain on its way; to learn how to roast corn on
the cob, to drink fresh “separator milk”, and to know the smell of a freshly
picked tomato.
And then the greatest lessons of all, to
learn that milk comes from cows and not from a bottle in the supermarket; that maize
meal comes from maize that must first be planted and harvested. That butter
comes from the cream that was separated from the milk and that cold butter will
definitely crumple your bread if you haven’t warmed it up first.
That was learning. Not all this elaborate
academic horseshit our children are being fed today. Why must little Johnny or Mary
already understand Newton's laws in grade one? What does it matter whether they
are already understand Physics and Applied Mathematics at that age? They have
their whole life ahead of them to learn all that.
But now it seems that as much as possible
must as quickly as possible be drilled into them. One would swear that someone is
afraid the poor little things may die before they have learned all this!
I remember so well when I was in grade 5, we
had to write an English essay about anything interesting that we have done or
experienced the previous weekend. How could I help but write about the farm.
On the particular Saturday, a heavy
thunderstorm broke on the farm. My dad’s sheep were in the pasture so I decided
to bring them into the shed for safety.
So, the topic of my essay was “The Sheep
and the Rain”
However, bear in mind that language and
spelling was never one of my strong points. In those days we had to learn "dictation",
instead of what is now called, spelling.
The second paragraph of my essay I will
never forget. It went like this:
"I went to bring the sheep to the kraal
(shed). But every time I keer (turn back the sheep) them here, the
wetherlight (lightning) strikes
there. And when I keer them there, the wetherlight strikes here."
A day later, when the teacher handed back my
essay book she wrote at the bottom of my literary masterpiece: "For your
story you get ten out of ten. But for English only half a point, because this
time you did not spell sheep with a "j" again!
Those were the days when children were
still growing up normally.
When children were still children.
