A school that started 113 years ago as a one-learner outfit in the house of a German pastor named Kuschke has grown into the renowned Deutsche Schule zu Johannesburg (DSJ) with almost 1000 learners.
International events helped fashion the school, with the flood of German immigrants following the gold rush to Johannesburg in the late 1890s, boosting enrolment. The First World War was a big setback – DSJ closed down in 1914 as its teachers went to fight, reopening in 1922 with 10 learners and three teachers.
But the Second World War was a blessing in disguise for DSJ: the increased immigration to South Africa from several countries worldwide, including Germany, helped attract more learners.
Although DSJ started admitting non-German speakers into their school in the late 1970s (including learners from Soweto and Eldoradopark), they only offer Afrikaans and French as additional languages. IsiZulu is offered only in the primary school because ‘there hasn’t been a demand for it in the senior classes,” says deputy school principal Ingo Vogt. He says there have been no more than three learners a year showing an interest in any local vernacular language .
The school employs German and English as media of instruction: German for learners taking German in the mother tongue stream and English for learners taking German as a third language in what is known as the New Secondary School.
The New Secondary School consists mainly of learners from Soweto and Eldoradopark who are chosen from the Saturday classes run by DSJ as an outreach programme. Thirty-six percent of the youngsters are chosen at the end of Grade 4 to start as full-time learners and are later integrated into the main school with the German students.
Learners are taught using a combination of the South African and German curricula. ‘One of the aims is to ensure that German children who come to school here can easily adapt to German schools should they go back to Germany,” Vogt says, adding that the two curricula are compatible.
Their commitment to things German is evident in the fact that 22 educators are employed from Germany ‘to keep constant contact with what is happening in Germany”.
After matric, learners may choose to do the Abitur programme, which is taught only in German. ‘Abitur is an extended university entrance examination that equates with the German university entrance certificate,” explains Vogt.
With extramurals from music to gymnastics, and facilities that include three art rooms and an internet café, DSJ learners must have every reason to keep on saying, ‘Das ist gut [This is good]”.