The question arises: when does an educational institution cease to belong to the people who once walked its corridors? For some former students, the answer is more complex than a final exam, a farewell, or stopping tuition payments. Schools like Bishops Diocesan College do more than just educate; they shape identity, friendships, social networks, rituals, and a strong sense of belonging. Bishops itself describes being a student there as carrying both a 'privilege and a responsibility.'
However, love for the institution is not the same as owning its future. In the discussion about inclusion, traditions, and the role of alumni, a fundamental question arises: do former students have the right to decide what belonging means for the next generation? Your memories, your friendships, and stories that happened, for example, behind the pavilion in 1987, belong to you, and perhaps should remain yours. But does it belong to the school?
There is a difference between attachment to an institution and the need to see it as a recognizable image for oneself. What kind of boys prepare schools for the world? Boys' schools have always taught masculinity, even if it wasn't a subject. This manifests on sports fields, in changing rooms, at assemblies, in friendships, in disciplinary systems, and in thousands of small signals through which a boy learns what types of men are valued.
Calls such as 'Be strong. Compete. Lead. Don't complain. Take the hit' can raise admirable people, but they can also teach boys that belonging has conditions. What happens to the boy who doesn't fit the dominant script? The boy who isn't good at rugby, isn't loud, is sensitive, or is gay? Does he belong because the admissions committee says so, or does belonging require something more?
This is why disagreements over symbols are more complex than either side allows. A flag cannot create inclusivity. A workplace does not become inclusive just because someone painted the logo in rainbow colors in June. A school does not become inclusive simply by raising a flag for 48 hours.
But this does not mean symbols are meaningless. If a symbol means nothing, why expend so much energy removing it? Can a school be neutral on issues of inclusion? One argument against flags related to any cause seems superficially appealing: schools should be neutral. But neutral towards what? Will the school remain neutral regarding racism, bullying, xenophobia, violence against women, or religious intolerance? Institutions inevitably transmit values. Bishops is historically not neutral. Founded in the tradition of the Anglican Church in 1849, the school places Christianity at the center of its self-identification in its own description of its history.
The question is not whether the school will transmit values, but which values will shape it and whose comfort will determine them. There is also a difference between deciding never to adopt a symbol and removing one that has already acquired meaning for people within the institution. Once the school told a group of boys, 'We see you,' rejecting that gesture does not return everyone to some pristine state of neutrality. These boys may quite reasonably hear something else: 'We have reconsidered how visibly we should see you.'
There is something seductive about the culture of old schools. Most of this culture never appears in the prospectus. It lives in traditions, songs, sports uniforms, stories, and familiar repetition: 'This is how we did it.' It also lives in codes of belonging: who is admired, who is teased, what is considered strength, what can be discussed openly, and what is better left unsaid.
But nostalgia is deceptive. It edits. We remember belonging without always remembering those who fought for it. We recall traditions without asking who was excluded by them. We remember what made us comfortable, and sometimes confuse our comfort with the character of the institution.
This is why the role of alumni should be stewardship, not guardianship. A steward looks forward and asks: what does this institution need to develop? A guardian, stuck in the past, asks: why can't everything stay the way it was when I was here? These are different, yet equally difficult questions.
South Africa, more than anywhere else, must understand the danger of confusing longevity with legitimacy. Many institutions in this country have traditions. History does not automatically make all of them worthy of preservation.
There is irony here. We send boys to prestigious schools because we want them to be ready for a world broader than ours. Then the world changes, and suddenly we want the school to protect them from it. Perhaps the true measure of a boys' school is not whether it reproduces its graduates, but whether it produces better men. Men who feel more comfortable with differences. Men whose masculinity does not depend on conforming to anyone else. Men who do not perceive the inclusion of another person as their personal displacement. Men capable of meeting something they do not fully understand, without immediately demanding its removal or issuing prohibitions.
Perhaps this is also the final test for the alumni themselves. Can you love the institution enough to allow it to change? Can you celebrate traditions without turning them into boundaries? Can you accept the fact that the boys currently walking these corridors may need things from their school that you did not have? And most importantly, can you accept that they are not just temporary custodians of your Bishops? Now, they are.
It may be difficult. But perhaps the last lesson a great school should teach its graduates is this: ultimately, the school stops belonging to you.