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.
Think about what that took. No marshals with clipboards. No code of conduct. No detention slips for anyone who talked. Twenty thousand people, many of whom had travelled all night, holding a disciplined silence because they had all agreed on something that mattered more than their discomfort.
That is the thing worth noticing this Women’s Month. Those women were, technically, on the wrong side of the rules. The pass laws were the rules. What they had instead was a principle, and a principle held in common turns out to be a far stronger organising force than any regulation ever printed.
What we are actually talking about
Most schools hide a distinction that almost nobody names out loud. It is the difference between a learner who does not swear because there is a rule against swearing, and a learner who does not swear because of what it does to the person in front of them.
From the doorway, these two learners look identical. Both are quiet. Both are compliant. Both make your Monday easier. But they are running on completely different fuel. The first one is rented. The moment the supervising adult leaves the room, that behaviour walks out with them. The second one is owned, and it travels: into the taxi, into the weekend, into the workplace fifteen years from now.
Watch what happens at an amber robot.
If you want to see how little a rule achieves on its own, sit at any intersection in this country and watch the amber.
The rule has not changed. It has never been ambiguous. Amber means stop if you safely can. Every driver passed a test that asked them this. And yet somewhere over the last two decades, amber has quietly been reclassified. It now means hurry. You will watch three cars go through on amber and a fourth arrive on solid red, and nobody hoots, because the fourth driver was only doing what the first three did.
The rule is intact. The road ignores it. What actually governs that intersection is not the regulation but the shared understanding, and the shared understanding has rotted.
Notice the sentence every one of those drivers would give you: everyone does it. Albert Bandura spent a career mapping exactly this. Diffusion of responsibility, normalisation, the comfort of the crowd. These are the standard exits people take out of their own moral judgement, and “everybody else was” is the widest one. Robert Sapolsky, in Behave, adds the other half: blame-based responses feel satisfying and change very little, which is why more cameras and steeper fines have not moved that amber back.
Now consider the children in the back seats of those cars. They are receiving an education about rules that is far more vivid than anything the code of conduct will manage.
Why thicker rule books do not fix this
When behaviour deteriorates, the instinct is to write more rules. Tighter uniform policy. A longer code of conduct. Clearer consequences. It feels like doing something. Think Zondo and Madlanga Commissions; more regulation and laws are coming!
But thick rule books quietly teach what we did not intend to teach. They train learners to ask “what am I allowed to do” rather than “what should I do”, and the first question is the one that eventually finds the amber light.
Pablo Hepworth Lloyd’s recent Financial Times Guide to Business Ethics reports something similar from the corporate world. One chief executive he interviewed scrapped her detailed dress code entirely and told her people to use their judgement, arguing that rules handle genuine complexity but rarely build trust, and tend to smother the initiative you were hoping for. If that holds for a professional services firm, it is worth asking why we assume the opposite of fourteen-year-olds.
Three moves that cost nothing
Name the principle before the rule. Every rule exists because of something underneath it, and most learners have never been told what it is. “Phones away” is a rule. “We protect each other’s attention because attention is the only thing you actually own in this building” is a principle, and it survives situations the rule never anticipated.
Create low-stakes decisions deliberately. Judgement is a muscle, and muscles develop under load, not under supervision. A learner permitted to decide nothing at fourteen cannot suddenly decide well at seventeen, when the stakes are gangs, sex and money.
Tell stories rather than issue reminders. One executive in Hepworth Lloyd’s book circulates a weekly story about a colleague who did the right thing, reasoning that people remember stories and forget spreadsheets. An assembly that names one real act of decency does more moral formation than a term of announcements about the tuck shop queue.
The rock and the road
Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo. You strike a woman, you strike a rock. The line has survived seventy years because it names what happens when conviction is internal rather than imposed. You cannot legislate a rock into existence. You can only grow one.
Our own work with Grade 8 learners keeps running into that stubborn fact. You can enforce a behaviour in a week. Growing the judgement underneath it takes most of a year, which is why we give it one.
The women at the Union Buildings needed no supervisor. That was the point, and it remains the standard.
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