My mother and I dragged the suitcases around the campus of my new school, taking it all in for the first time. We had been in eSwatini for only a few hours and I was still getting used to the lush, green landscape enveloping us wherever we went. We were directed in to a large white building that crawled up diagonally, walked past two corridors of rooms and a communal bathroom, and walked up the steps to the tiny dorm room where my new life would begin.
Ekukhuleni was the hostel for the twelve, thirteen, and fourteen-year-old boarding students. First years such as myself all stayed in the same hallway that was connected at the top to the living room of the teacher responsible for all of us, Ms. Cameron. Warm and loud, she was a White South African woman, a few years younger than my mom and a few inches taller than me. She doubled as both the head of the girls hostel in Ekukhuleni and was also the geography and drama teacher, so we would be seeing her inside and outside of the dorms.
To my mother’s delight, my room was only a few doors down from Ms. Cameron and after hugs and introductions from her, we squeezed back into my room and unpacked my clothes, photographs, and books. An hour or so later, we heard a knock on the door and voices outside, and we opened it to a girl my age with the biggest, kindest smile standing there with her parents right behind her. Ms. Cameron introduced her as my roommate, and there we all stood, awkwardly trying to figure out if we were ready for what was coming next.
I think a lot about a tweet I once saw that said the thing about being a kid is that you’ll have the most traumatic night of your life and then go to school the next day. Until we enter adulthood, most of us spend a third of our day, five days a week, at school, and even more for those of us involved in soccer practice or band rehearsals, and even more so for those of us who lived at school. As a result, we have no choice but to process all that happens inside and outside of schools in the classroom or the cafeteria or the hallway. Life happens as we are in school. And schools are where life happens.
Hence, the pastoral obligations that come with an education. Schools exist to not only provide students with the knowledge that they will need as adults, but with the skills they will require too. We place the majority of our focus on the former, often at the expense of considering and appreciating all the work teachers and educators do to guide students through falling out with friends, mending a broken heart, feeling left out and alone, and all of the other mini and major tragedies that characterise a life.
An education teaches how to weather the storms of life and often times that begins with just care. A hug, a check-in, a pep talk, a lecture, all of which shepherd young people into becoming who they are meant to be, by teaching, showing, and telling them that they are cared for, and helping them through as best as they can. What can pastoral care look like in schools, and what are the obstacles at play? Why does it all matter and what is at risk when we minimise the saliency of supporting students’ inner lives too? What do kids need and how do we get it to them?
There were adults everywhere in Ekukhs. If we were in the girls hostel, Ms. Cameron was never too far away. If someone snuck into the boys hostel, Ms. T., the boys’ equivalent, was always around. If we were watching a movie in the common room, there was a teacher on duty in the office a few feet away. And even if you were in the amphitheater, a ways away from campus, playing an elaborate game of The Beyonce Show in which you and your friends act out a television show where Beyonce interviews people from your high school about gossip that you all have eavesdropped, one of the adults who lived on campus would eventually walk by and politely laugh to themselves at the gaggle of teenage girls laughing and screaming at the top of their lungs.
They were always around but they gave us space. They never surveilled or pried or interrogated, they were just there. And when we wanted to be around a grown-up because we missed our parents who were thousands of miles away, they were there. We could watch TV at their house, or complain in their living room, or just sit and read in the office in the same vicinity as them, and without us even knowing it, they were looking out for us.
And so when the big things happened, they were there too. Homesickness. Divorce. Death. The adults in Ekukhuleni were great at not knowing or even trying to get to know every detail of our lives, but they knew us well enough to know when something was wrong and to know how to help us through it, with food or advice or hugs or just space to sit and cry and know that as alone as we may be feeling, we were never really alone. And when you’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that’s all you want to know.
Kids want to know that the adults in their lives are there for them. That they can ask for comfort and guidance and love and boundaries, and that those requests will be respected and met, even if not in the way that they may always want. Care in schools begins with this, by having teachers, guidance counsellors, coaches, nurses, counsellors, administrative assistants, custodians, bus drivers and more who are there to support students, not only academically, but social-emotionally too. We tend to overly-valorise narratives of social-emotional support where teachers are driving students around, or buying them new wardrobes, all of which are essential and necessary, but continue to perpetuate the idea that those who work with kids are superheroes and that the base-line expectation for those doing the work is to go above and beyond, 24/7, 365. That might not be it.
Pastoral care, providing students with the skills and support to grow and succeed emotionally, requires ultimately adults who can show up. Not adults who are burnt out and still required to do and be everything, but adults who can show up in the small ways that make a big impact. What would it look like to recognise care in schools as the greetings shared from adults to children first thing in the morning, teaching them that they are welcome and valued, and modelling what that appreciation can look like? How do we make more space for students and adults to have time for conversation, in morning circles or homerooms, where the focus is not on academics, but on asking and answering questions about how we are all feeling, teaching students to prioritise their emotions in themselves? Why do we insist that the only way to work with students is through sacrifice and martyrdom, when what ultimately students are asking for is adults who are well enough — physically, emotionally, and financially well — and are able to listen to them and what they need?
We want to graduate students who not only know how to survive in the world but to live in it. We need students who are not only academically equipped to take on the careers and passions that will build and shape our worlds, but who also feel cared enough by the world to care for it further. In order to do this, we have to carve out space for an education ethic in which caring for students is a priority, but not in a way that comes at the expense of the adults doing the work. We need schools and classrooms that are staffed well-enough to support students, with conditions that go above and beyond mere adequacy so that students get us at our best. Because that’s what they deserve.
I want to end on friendship. I moved into Ekukhuleni in January 2008 with a Motorola flip phone and no laptop. There was one TV for all thirty of us and the bus took us to the mall on Wednesdays and Saturdays for no more than two hours. When I think back on those first few years to try and remember what we did all day, most of it involved hanging out. Hours spent at cafeteria tables talking, lying outside on the grass falling asleep, coming up with dance routines to perform to each other. It was everything.
I think being in an environment where we felt cared for meant that we could care for each other. We would swap clothes frantically in the morning getting ready for school, we would share food when we were starving and it was only 7pm at night, and we would pile into a room and put our growing minds together coming up with game plans for how to get our crushes to like us back. We were caring for each other the best way we knew how, by being there.
Schools need care, kids need care, our world needs care, and it is contingent much of the time on us showing up. On being an adult that a young person can come to, or look to, or just know comfortably that they care for them. Without it, we risk continuing cycles of hurt and pain that we all feel the repercussions of. With it, we build and enter communities of safety and love and compassion that can reverberate for decades to come. What do we want to do?