Moving from Emhlabeni to Esiveni, there was one thing I was looking most forward to. In the former residential hall for the sixth to eight graders at my school, I had spent the last three years on a bunkbed in a tiny dorm room that, worst of all, I had to clean up for inspection every Sunday afternoon. QB Checks — with QB short for cubicle — had nothing to do with searches for paraphanelia, although I would have gladly welcomed the investigation as a newly minted teenager with nothing to hide. No, what I dreaded was having to clean up — folding the heap of clothes forming a small mountain at the foot of my bunk, organising the homework assignments and term papers sprawled across my desk, and pulling up the textbooks and Noughts and Crosses paperbacks shoved into my closet.
It didn't take me long to fall in love with boarding school. I got to spend my teenage years with my friends, all day, everyday. I missed my parents and my family a lot, and I was also surrounded by adults who I knew cared about me and were always looking out for me. Best of all, I felt incredibly free. There were rules against leaving campus and drugs and alcohol, and there was a set 90-minutes every night where in Emhlabeni we all had to sit in the cafeteria and do our homework, but beyond that, we were free. We could go to mealtimes exactly when the cafeteria opened, we could rush there in the last ten minutes before it closed, or we could skip meals altogether. We could do a sport after school, or we could go to our rooms and read in bed, or we could sit with our friends and snack on chips bought from the tuck shop. We were always safe and we were always being checked on and if we ever had too much free time or weren’t using it productively, we might be gently (or not so gently) nudged in a different direction by one of our favourite teachers. But we were free to make our own choices a million times a day.
QB check was one of the last strongholds on my independence. In Esiveni, the residential hall for ninth and tenth graders, I was going to have my own room that I could keep as messy as I wanted. I would no longer have to surrender my Sunday afternoons to correcting the chaos that I created. I could do more important things with my time, like watch new episodes of Jersey Shore on the television in the common room. I was grown, allowed to call the shots on my own.
One of the most purported objectives of education is to gradually instil in students an independence that they can carry on into their post-schooling, adult lives. We understand that young children won’t be young children forever and the grown-ups around them won’t always be there, and so we want school to teach them to how to read and write and emotionally regulate and stay on task and encourage themselves. When they ask for help spelling a word, we tell them to sound it out. When they get in a fight with their friends, we ask how they think they could resolve it. When they make a mistake on a math problem, we ask them to check it and try again. Much of education is the balancing act of a process teachers call “I Do, We Do, You Do” — modeling, scaffolding, and then trusting students to do that work on their own.
That is the thinking at least. But many of the crises in education can be interpreted at least partially as disagreements in regards to the extent that we believe students can and should be independent. Should children be allowed to choose their own books, their own pronouns, their own versions of history to study? Or should adults jump in to “protect” them by elongating the “I Do” process — read as I do, learn as I do, believe as I do? Furthermore, how do we consider the nuances and parameters of our expectations around independence? At what ages do we trust students with certain responsibilities? When do we want kids to be able to tie their own shoes, walk themselves to school, conduct science experiences, and more, both inside and outside of the classroom?
Our ideas around schooling and independence reveal greater ideas about society at-large. Which kids do we place expectations around independence around and what role does race, gender, class, ability, and culture play in determining whether or not we feel like a child — or adult — can do something on their own? Moreover, why is independence, as a social value, so salient to us? What is frustrating or scary or exciting to us about seeing young people able — or unable — to navigate the world or their own? And lastly, what kind of world are we trying to create when we seek to foster independence through education, and how do we make sure that we do it meaningfully?
Moving to Esiveni in the ninth grade brought many other changes beyond the end of QB checks. We all had our own rooms that were further away from where the head of hostel lived. We got to pick our own subjects for IGCSEs and could drop what we didn’t like and keep going with our favourites. We had free periods for the first time where we had 40 minutes free to complete overdo assignments, catch up on sleep, or procrastinate with our friends who we had already spent the entire day with.
Like many of my classmates, my parents had spent their K-12 education abroad or cities away from their hometowns, just as their parents before them had too. Formal education systems introduced by colonial powers across the continent brought with them centralized school houses that were traveled to from far and wide. Furthermore, the most academically gifted children and those of African elites such as chiefs or civil servants received educational opportunities in Europe and North America as a part of their privilege. Consequentially decades later, boarding school remains part of the educational culture on the continent, across class levels, with the most advantaged families continuing to send their children to the best schools available to them, no matter how far. For many, boarding school is seen as a rite of passage, preparing students with the skills, knowledge, and distance to be their own person. And with every year, I came closer to realizing that destiny, knowing that I wasn’t alone, but that I was doing what others before me has done too.
Plus, like my family when they were in school, I was never truly alone. I grew up hearing the stories of the teachers and classmates who shaped my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and others, and I saw my community shape me too. Independence, I learned, is best when co-created, both through the guidance and freedom given from adults, and through the example and camaraderie experienced with peers. We taught each other how to be independent through our dependence on each other — waking each other up in the morning, bringing each other food when we were sick, relaxing our hair in the sinks by the bathrooms, squeezing into our rooms to carefully dissect text messages sent through BBM. We pulled each other up to stand on our own two feet, often without even realising we were doing it.
There has been widespread hysteria about the state of Millennials and Gen-Z over the past few decades of the 21st century. From the image of the Judd Apatow-esque “man-child” unable to grow up, to the articles alarmed by how many young people live at home, work freelance as part of the gig economy, and live/survive without their own healthcare, there is a belief that those born post-1980 struggle to function in society as independent human beings. That we are over-reliant on our families and technology and the government to meet our needs, and that these problems began in child-rearing and in education, through helicopter parents and teachers hell-bent on rewarding for just on participation. But even the most hysterical and overexagerated concerns hold some weight to them. The truth is that a world where not all of us are comfortable doing things on our own will inevitably place a strain on those who will have to be depended on, whilst also undermining the feelings of those who might wish they could do things on their own but feel ill-equipped to do so.
However, when we think about how we view individual independence when it comes to kids and adults, we must consider the role that wider biases around identity might be playing. Do we have the same expectations around little girls and little boys when it comes to believing they should be able to clean up after themselves or self-regulate their emotions, or do we push the former to be more independent earlier with higher expectations to be neat and tidy and expect the latter to more independently self-soothe when emotional? How is it that the students given more freedom in the subjects that they get to choose and the type of learning that they get to engage in often tend to be Whiter and more socio-economically advantaged taking sculpture lessons and coding classes and responding to assignments through song, whilst we tend to micromanage the educational experiences of less socio-economically privileged students of color who are given less independence by being expected to engage in more rote classroom learning and traditional term papers and assignments? And when we consider adults that we expect to have it altogether, who gets to feel more comfortable calling home and asking for support or taking time off to find oneself, and who do we expect to carry the weight of the world on their own?
We need an approach to education that teaches all students how to equally and gradually get to a place of independence where they feel comfortable in themselves and their abilities. An education comfortable with all students experiencing a little bit of struggle when hanging up a backpack or sounding out a word, because we trust them to get there in their own time and we want them to feel successful when they do so. An education compassionate enough to provide all students with mental health supports, because we understand that we all need help at times to get us back to wherever we need to be. An education with teachers who have enough time and capacity to calibrate what individual students need, with resources provided to all students to help scaffold through wherever they are, and an approach to equity and justice that sees all students as human beings with the right to autonomy and the right to help when asked for.
Much of who I am today emerged in those two years in Esiveni. Being able to motivate myself to get out of bed when it was time, complete my work and show up where I was expected when I needed to, and turn away from distraction and towards more positive choices — I developed all of that during my time in Esiveni. And yes, that also included learning when it was time to stop procrastinating and at least try to clean up, even if just for my own sake.
Years later, my education appears to have done its job. With the help of teachers, friends, and especially my family, I was able to get myself through college and graduate school, and find a job and an apartment, and manage to keep it together enough, mentally and emotionally. Though not without some areas of growth remaining. It has taken me 27 years to start to see the ways in which being overly independent can make it hard to ask for help, or try something new without feeling like only I will be there to pick myself up if it doesn’t work out. For all the merits of independence, too much of it does have its shortcomings too.
If we want the purpose of education to be fostering independence, we need to be thoughtful in considering what that means and what it looks like. That starts with interrogating our own beliefs and expectations around not only education, but around life and how we feel it is best lived. How much independence should we have and where do we start to reach out towards others. It feels good to know we can go it alone but that we don’t have to. Our kids should get the chance to know how both feel.