On 18 October 2009 the South African newspaper The Sunday Times released a list of the Top 100 (link to the PDF file of the complete Top Schools Package) schools in the country. Along with the list, they included various articles about the top school per province and the top maths and science schools.

www.timeslive.co.za

The vast majority of the top schools are highly privileged. However, a few rural and vastly underprivileged schools have made it to the list. Raucall Secondary Schools in Gauteng Province (read page 3) is the top Mathematics school in the country. This school was founded specifically for historically disadvantaged students. Mbilwi Secondary School in Limpopo Province (read page 3), which has extreme staff- and equipment shortage, is the top Science school in the country.

Bear in mind that these subjects are difficult and require good teachers, extensive teaching and sufficient resources.

If you have read this blog, you will have picked up that I am a huge supporter of the education-poverty link, as well as the impact of poverty upon the standard of education.

This impact is real – the article Stars of the past battle to cope today on page 2 illustrates this very clearly.

However, it gives me a kind of warm, fuzzy feeling to read of desperately poor schools from harsh backgrounds that are excelling despite their challenges. Perhaps they are even excelling because of their challenges.

It is difficult to teach the principles of chemistry without a chemistry laboratory, similarly it is difficult to teach maths effectively when the student-textbook-desk ratio is about 3:1:1.

Photo courtesy of symmetry_mind's Flickr photostream.

Yet there are schools that are doing just that. Schools that are using their circumstances as motivation to work harder, to push students more and to explore more alleys of tutoring in order to change the face of the country.

Poverty can hurt the standard of a school severely, and yet it is possible to rise above it.

In my eyes, they deserve greater honour than the very top school in the country.

To those schools: I salute you.