What happened to the ethos of a calling?

Reports last week of teachers preventing children from not only preparing with prelim exams for probably their most important platform to launch themselves as productive, well-adjusted participants into the life of adulthood, but even tearing up and burning the papers of those who showed determination to make a success of their life, was extremely unsettling for many. We seem to have lost something as a nation.

When thinking back to my high-school days in the mid-1960s there is always one person who stands tall in the landscape that is my memory.

His name was Bill Boshoff and he was our accounting teacher. But Bill, just seven or eight years our senior, was much more than the man who turned his subject into more than a mere exercise  of acquiring some knowledge of entries and counter-entries on paper. It became a living reality as he walked up and down in front of the class, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat giving a live performance – it was theatre delivered with absolute enthusiasm.

But to many of us from poor blue-collar homes who went to school in our hand-me-downs, he was much more. He was the man who coached myself and others as aspiring middle-distance runners during summer months and as cross-country athletes during winter – teaching us life-lessons about the value of discipline, dedication, perseverance, strategy and a competitive spirit.

Not only was he, on Thursdays, our drill-sergeant  who prepared us for cadet competitions, but as an officer of the Voortrekker youth movement he would take us on field trips and holiday camps, where he and other teachers taught us about the veld and living in harmony with nature. For some of my friends they gave them their first experience of the sea and took us on our first trip across our borders with a visit to the then Lourenco Marques in Mozambique.

In short, besides my life with loving parents and three brothers in a small three-bedroomed concrete-cast  scheme house there was no greater influence in my life than Bill Boshoff.

But Bill was also a man who kept on studying part-time at night. By the time we reached matric in the year 1965 he had added an MBA to his BCom. He was offered the position as company secretary of a national building society.

“Piet, I will be paying more in tax in the new job than I earn as a salary now. There is no way that I cannot accept this offer,” he told me at the time.

A few weeks later, my last matric-paper behind me, I went to his home on my bicycle to say my goodbyes. I also wanted to make arrangements to visit him the next year in Pretoria where his office would be right on Church Square and when I would be doing my national service just south of the city.

He told me that I would have to come back to Vanderbijl Park to visit him because he was not going to Pretoria anymore.

“I would wake up in the middle of the night so low in spirit that I could not lift my hands. I came to the realisation that God has placed me on this earth to be a teacher. I dare not forsake that for money,” he told me.

Some years later he would indeed end up in Pretoria in a key senior management position in the department of education of the old Transvaal province.

How I wish that Bill and his like were still around for the sake of my laatskapie and grandchildren. Every child needs and deserves a Bill Boshoff in their life growing up.

Piet Coetzer, editor Leadership Intelligence Bulletin