RCPL

Short for “Royal College Port Louis.” Once Mauritius’s premier boys’ secondary school that would take in the country’s top primary school “tuition-reliant, exam-smart” pupils, and would nurture future political and business leaders to run the volcanic island, where the dodo used to roam freely.

For decades, the day-to-day running of RCPL was like a sheep managing 1,000-odd lions—when the school principal was often someone who self-glorified himself, by attributing the number of high-school laureates the school produced every year to his “leadership,” when his priority should be to improve the school’s perennial mediocre 50⁺% passing rate to 90⁺% for high school students, based on the caliber of students being admitted every year.

by MathPlus January 21, 2021