Rudder4Life Blog

Walk through any shopping centre in Cape Town on a Saturday morning, and you will find a stand selling the future to parents. Coding for kids. Robotics club. An AI workshop, six weeks, certificate at the end. The logic feels airtight. Technology is eating the world of work, so buy your child

There is a particular silence in a school staffroom when another good teacher hands in their notice. Everyone nods, someone mentions the salary, someone else the paperwork, and the real reason goes unspoken because it is harder to name. Today, in Daily Maverick, the journalist Takudzwa Pongweni put a number to that

There is a script most of us grew up with. Learn until your early twenties. Work until sixty. Retire with a braai, a gold watch and a garden. Three neat chapters, in one fixed order. Leadership author Dan Pontefract has news for us: the script is finished. In his new book, The

A US state’s exhaustive search for the secret to social-emotional learning ended in a truth African communities have carried for generations. In 2015, the State of Washington set out to answer a question that should keep every education decision-maker awake at night: how do we deliberately grow young people who can manage

What if the habits your child practises at fourteen are not phases they will grow out of, but wiring they will carry for life? Every parent and teacher has watched it happen. The learner who promises to stop leaving homework until the night before means it sincerely, and by Thursday, is back

You walk into a room and, within seconds, you know your mother is upset. You haven’t asked. Nobody has said a word. Yet your stomach tightens, your plans for the evening quietly rearrange themselves, and a familiar question forms at the back of your mind: what did I do? If that scene

Watch a four-year-old for ten minutes. Why is the sky blue? Where does the rain go? What happens if I mix these two? They run experiments all day long, treating the world like one big laboratory and themselves as the lead researcher. No one teaches a toddler to be curious. It comes

Every 16th of June, we pay tribute to the courageous youth of 1976, a pivotal moment in history that this year marks its 50th anniversary. These young people took charge of their own destiny when the adults around them faltered. However, we want to use this momentous occasion to invite the parents,

In the earlier blog, we said the disorganised heart could learn a third thing beyond reaching and withdrawing. It could learn to stay, and in time become the harbour it had always been searching for. That holds. But here is the part nobody mentions on the day the weather finally clears: a

There is a particular loneliness that does not come from being alone. It arrives in company, often with the very person you most wanted near. You long for them, and the moment they draw close, something in you tightens, scans the exits, and prepares for impact. You reach with one hand and

Part One In 2006, a neuroscientist at Stanford named Robert Sapolsky began writing a book that would take him twelve years to complete. The result, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, is one of the most important and least comfortable books written about why human beings do what

The previous blog ended with a bold statement: gangs are gaining power in South Africa because they fulfil needs that society often neglects. This leads to an important question: if gangs are succeeding in this area, are schools failing? Unfortunately, they are, and for the same reasons. Both gangs and schools are