Are Teachers Quitting Because They’re Doing It Alone?
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 silence. South Africa […]
Preparing Kids for an Imaginary Retirement Party?
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 Future of Work […]
Four Years, Millions of Dollars, One Ancient Answer
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 their emotions, build […]
Your Teenager Is Not Difficult. Their Brain Is Under Construction.
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 at the kitchen […]
Stop Carrying Feelings That Were Never Yours to Hold
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 feels less like […]
Your Child Was Born a Scientist. We Quietly Made Them Stop.
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 built in, like […]
Why You and Your Teenager Keep Crashing!
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, teachers, principals, and […]
The Storm Has Passed. So Why Are You Still Bracing?
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 body that spent […]
Why You Reach for Love With One Hand and Brace With the Other
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 brace with the […]
What If the Child Who Misbehaves Is Not Broken, Just Unfinished?
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 they do. It […]