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Oprah’s school for girls in South Africa to hold its 1st graduation
As a celebrity, Winfrey said: “All of your mistakes are amplified and show up on the evening news.”
Winfrey said there were times when she wondered if her project would fail, but she could not give up, both for herself and for Nelson Mandela, who she says inspired her to build the school.
South Africa’s education problems result from decades of black people being denied resources and dignity under apartheid. Since the dawn of multiracial democracy in 1994, progress in righting the educational and other wrongs of the past has been slow and fitful.
Graeme Bloch, an education specialist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, said he is among those who worry elite schools like Winfrey’s can produce elitists. But he praised Winfrey for trying to ensure her students understood they needed to give back to their communities.
The Winfrey students, who call their school’s founder Mam Oprah, lectured in their communities about AIDS, created and ran breast cancer awareness campaigns, even picked up trash in the streets of Henley-on-Klip, where the school is located.
Winfrey’s was among just 544 out of some 6,500 South African schools whose entire graduating class passed national final year exams last year. Many of the schools with a 100 percent pass rate were either private like Winfrey’s, or among the best public schools that had been reserved for whites under apartheid and received the bulk of public school funding.
Black students attend South Africa’s elite schools, on scholarship or because their families are among an emerging black middle and upper class. But Winfrey’s is among the few top schools that can say all the students it shepherded through the exams were from poor families, most of them black.
Laurence Corner directs the Student Sponsorship Programme, which for the past decade has raised funds from corporations and individuals to place promising students from South Africa’s poorest communities in its best schools.
Corner said that while his own program and schools like Winfrey’s can enroll relatively few students, they have wide impact.
Entire communities start to see their young people have potential, and people are inspired to become philanthropists, he said.
“It’s very important for disadvantaged communities to have role models from their own communities,” he said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
