The Native Voluntary School in Puun Tunoh

The late Gundohing Josue Moinin, a senior teacher from the Catholic Mission School in Penampang at that time, resigned his teaching post to start a Kadazandusun school in Kampung Puun Tunoh during the first quarter of the 1950s.. It was a selfless act of bringing a school nearer to the children. Like the situations in both Kampung Sugud and Kampung Babagon where the initiators errected the schools on their own land, the late Gundohing Josue Moinin also errected the Kadazandusun school in Kampung Puun Tunoh on his own beautiful land. He also became the first teacher of his school. That gentlemen could function very well in both spoken and written English. The medium of instruction of the Kadazandusun school in Kampung Puun Tunoh was in the Kadazandusun Language with strong lesson periods in English. It was therefore such a pity that all those first Kadazandusun schools did not survive their infancy periods. The Kadazandusun school in Kampung Babagon and in Kampung Sugud had strong emphasis on lesson periods in English. The general mentality of the Kadazandusun generalities in those days was that the ability to speak a little English was a clear sign of ones’ good education. But, they all had special emphasis and lesson-periods on trying to muster the communicative and linguitic competence of their own language, the Kadazandusun Language, of the Tangaa’ dialect. Their teachers, though not trained to teach pupils, were all elderly otai and they were capable to temporarily perform their immediate tasks of teaching the teachable.