Child's Perceptions

A child’s perception of the world can be very skewed.

As a child I went to an all boy catholic school. It never occurred to me that there weren’t girls at the school. They weren’t there so I didn’t notice that they weren’t there. Also, this was during the apartheid era in South Africa and privately run catholic schools taught any race or creed so I was blissfully unaware that there was even such a thing as apartheid.

This perception changed when my family decided to move to Johannesburg and I was put in a government school.

There were girls in this school, learning alongside the boys. Now that they were visibly at school, it occurred to me that they weren’t at the private school. I thought that girls in the coast must not do careers but must simply stay at home and do house work or have boyfriends and get married or something because they didn’t go to school. The girls in Johannesburg must want to work and have careers if they were going to school!

Heavens knows where I got this notion from because my cousins and aunt were at school in the coast and I didn’t get to see them until late in the afternoon on some days because of it. They’d arrive home with their school clothes on, so where I got the notion that the girls on the coast didn’t work or go to school I have no idea!

Then there was the race thing. There were no races other than white in the government school. I simply thought there were a lot more white people living in Johannesburg and that’s why there weren’t any children of other races at school. It never occurred to me that they weren’t allowed to attend!

Funny how children think and a pity I had to grow up…