The shared-facility model separates physical infrastructure from institutional identity. Multiple fully fledged schools, each with its own language of instruction, leadership, governance and pedagogical culture, can operate from the same physical site. They share facilities, not identity. Space, not soul.

South Africa's debate about language in education has become strangely stuck. Everyone agrees, at least in principle, that learning in one's mother tongue matters. The Constitution says so. Decades of international evidence say so. Teachers know it instinctively. And yet, when the conversation shifts from principle to practice, it hardens into fear, litigation and zero-sum politics.

The result is paralysis.

At the centre of this paralysis sits an unspoken assumption: that expanding mother-tongue education in African languages must necessarily come at the expense of existing schools, particularly Afrikaans-medium schools with strong infrastructure, stable governance and proven educational outcomes. Once that assumption takes hold, the debate is no longer about children or learning. It becomes about loss, displacement and institutional survival.

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It is precisely this dead end that the "one facility, two or more schools" model seeks to escape.

The idea is disarmingly simple. School buildings are public assets. They are bricks, halls, laboratories, sports fields and libraries. They are not, or should not be, exclusive cultural territories owned by a single linguistic community for all time. If that sounds provocative, it is only because we have grown used to treating scarcity as natural, rather than questioning how we organise what...