Rudder4Life Blog

On 9 August 1956, roughly twenty thousand women walked up to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest the extension of the pass laws. Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn led them. They delivered their petitions. And then they stood, for thirty minutes, in complete silence, before singing.

Most teachers see two piles on their desks-merit stickers and detention slips-but these are not true opposites. They are the same tool fueled by adult-driven motivation, which can undermine sustainable student engagement. They are not opposites. They are the same tool held at either end, and both run on the same fuel.

On 18 July, thousands of us pull on a branded T-shirt, drive out to a school somewhere on the Cape Flats, paint a wall, ladle soup into polystyrene cups, take the photograph and drive home again. The wall needed painting. The soup was hot, and the children were glad of it. The

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