Best School in The World

For me the school day used to start at 7.30 am when my own children in Ireland are now turning over for their second sleep. I’d been up from 6 am, washed in water I thought was as cold as ice, had a breakfast of maize porridge and fish and still had time to play with friends for half an hour. This was Zambia.

I was English-speaking and there were no English-speaking schools to be had for a few hundred miles. The only alternative was to be home-taught by my mother who left school when she was 14 years old and who learned how to teach effectively on the job.

At 7.30 the lounge became a school room, and using a distance learning course from Rhodesia (as it was then) mother taught me until noon. We covered all the usual stuff – numeracy, literacy and so on, everything boys my age were learning back in Ireland.

But there was more. At break time, around 9.30, we went next door to join another family for half an hour of juice and biscuits before continuing to do music and art as a big joined up class of 3. After lunch it was climbing trees, damming streams, looking for snakes to run away from – that covered physical exercise.

That went on till I was 10 years old. It started when I was six, and after those four idyllic years we moved to the city which had a school, and life became regimented, organised by experts and unspeakably dull.

However mother must be pretty pleased with herself: I can read and write and I’ve been to University and I hold down a good job, and I attribute it to the fact that I went to the best school in the world.