At St Mary’s, one of the rituals of transition we have is that every girl in Grade 4 is given a Bible. To make sense of the things we do as part of our beginning of the year activities and not to lose sight of the meaning, I have found it necessary to reflect on why we do what we do and how best to help the girls understand.

In my reflections, I have found the following remarks by Archbishop Rowan Williams on childhood and choice helpful:

“Childhood, after all, is a period we’ve come to think of as ‘latency’… to manage such a period requires a certain confidence that the society we inhabit has the resources to carry passengers, a confidence that we know how to live alongside people whose participation in our social forms is not like ours. It is not that the child doesn’t have a share in society; but, on the whole, developed and not-so-developed cultures alike have granted that the child does not have the same kind of negotiating role in society as the adult. Hence the prevalence of rituals of transition…”

and

“But this implies that we as adult social agents are obliged to bear with what goes before, with the indeterminacies of childhood. A society with clearly marked transitional rituals is committed to guaranteeing the integrity of such a period, and a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing the child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible is one that has lost patience with that kind of commitment.”

These quotes challenge us to stop and reflect on our duty as a school to the girls and boys in the Junior School. It is my hope that they challenge you, as much as they have challenged me.

A special thank you to the Grade 6s, who did a fantastic job helping the Grade 4s find their way in the hymn book and Bible in our beginning-of-term chapel service.

REVD RAKGADI KHOBO
CHAPLAIN