history of education in south africa essay

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Essay: South African Education Systems

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South African Education Systems

South Africa is a multi-cultural diverse country; this is in spite of the many disputes within our historically rich nation. Our history as a nation has for many years defined us, and categorized people into derogatory groups, not individually but collectively, where gender and race have been paving the forefront of many of our nation’s downfalls. Since our transition as a country from an Apartheid ruled nation to that of a democracy in 1994, there has been a substantial decline in the quality of our education system as well as the confusion of the role of teacher authority in the eyes of the student. The infamous history of South Africa can be highly related to the overbearing inequality the people have dealt with for many generations. This inequality reached the household of every individual of colour and affected them either directly or indirectly in a detrimental fashion. However, what most citizens of colour of the Apartheid regime can agree upon is the manner in which the education system has drastically altered over the years. The government have been trying to implement a system that works for all and has thus far failed to do so. The education system remains an unsolved puzzle post-apartheid. ‘The very name apartheid indicates the importance of race-based geography and race based policy’, says Leibrandt and Woolard, by exploring the impact that poverty has on the economic history of South Africa post-apartheid, they also formulate the link that the inequality of the education system provided and due to apartheid has on procuring ill fit individuals for society. This article serves to explore whether there is a correlation between the history of the South African education systems throughout the pre- and post-apartheid years and whether the political background of South Africa has influenced the learners’ perception on teacher authority. This article will also highlight possible recommendations that can be incorporated and implemented within the education system, to improve the current complications and quality in the education system of South Africa. The overall intent of this article is to find the relevance of Jansen’s statement; ‘What is wrong with our schools- [is] the complete loss of authority in education’, to that of previous literature studies with regards to the education system and the effects that the history of the South African education system, during and post-apartheid, has had on the manner in which learners currently perceive teacher authority in South African schools.

In order to understand the true definition surrounding the word ‘authority’, one first needs to understand its basis of its context in which it affects. Authority in South Africa has been as of yet quite controversial, and before we can understand the authority roles of the government we need to understand their roles in the history of South Africa. We need to delve into the historically rich controversies of this nation, with complete emphasis on the South African education system during and post-apartheid, which dates back from 1948 to 1994. There are two important themes circulated throughout this article; the history of the education system in South Africa and the theme of teacher authority in South African schools. This will be accomplished by making reference to that of previous literature studies, as well as making reference to that of specific theorists and scholars which excel in their concepts of authority. The ultimate purpose of this article is to explore whether the political background of South Africa influenced learners’ perception on teacher authority, providing a final stance on the agenda by providing recommendations in order to increase the quality of the education system of South Africa.

The history of the education system in South Africa During Apartheid (1948-1994) Hartshorne states that an education in any given country reflects the political and traditional preferences as well as the values of that particular country and that education exists in the perspective of certain social, economic, political and constitutional authority (Hartshorne, 1985). This is a profound opening statement with reference to his article on the state of education in South Africa, as he raises valuable arguments that support it, with special reference to that of the pressures for reform in the country that started with the Soweto uprising on 16 June 1976. It is the ‘black education’ as Hartshorne says, that remains the critical area of education. It is there in which so many students are not exceling and for this reason the South African Council for Education (SACE), which had to report to Parliament, was formulated. During apartheid the education system was divided into eighteen separate systems; Indian, Coloured (mixed race), eleven black and five white. Not only were people of colour discriminated against their race but were also devastatingly discriminated against with regards to the blatant lack of financing, resources, facilities, quality and outcome of their education. Hartshorne states that instead of education having a common purpose, which is to create a competent society of individuals that can contribute greatly to the economic uprising of South Africa and its future, that apartheid allowed for the complete separation of individuals due to the composition of its divisive nature. With all of the stigmas associated with the terrible regime of apartheid, how then, did the teachers of that era produce a lineage of learners that questioned themselves before they questioned the system? How did the ones in authority, remain in authority for so many years before being overthrown? What made the students of apartheid disciplined enough to not overthrow the authority of the teacher or the system itself? These are the questions that we will explore in this article and ultimately attempt to answer with reference to that of previous literature studies.

Post-Apartheid (1994- present date) The theme throughout the apartheid regime was that of separation geographically and most devastatingly racially. According to Ramdass (Ramdass, 2007), the ultimate aim of apartheid to non-whites was to create a scenario of inferior education, where whites remained in power over people of colour. He highlights many challenges that the democratic individuals that originate from the apartheid era as well as their offspring will face post-apartheid. As of 1994, South Africa has been a democratic country and the purpose of the country has been solely on rectifying the inequalities within our precedent history. He also states that due to political corruption caused by our government, the authority figures of our country, the education system will remain unstable. Ramdass argues that the quality of South African education relates to that of skill shortage with regards to teachers, that government is not doing enough to ensure that all teachers are skilled. There are arguably less training colleges dedicated to teachers to aid them in their teaching abilities. According to Ramdass, during the apartheid regime there were ample teacher training colleges that produced teachers of the highest calibre for the primary and secondary sectors (Ramdass, 2007). ‘There is a total lack of discipline in schools. It has deteriorated to such an extent that students severely injure teachers and fellow colleagues to the extent that the crime kills them’ (Berger, 2003). This statement highlights the impact that crime has on education post-apartheid. Ramdass, emphasises how crime and violence occurring within the surrounding areas of a school can jeopardise the students motivation to learn. However, the main theme explored within the works of Ramdass remains the fact that so little skilled teachers are available to teach the basics. Which poses yet another question; do unskilled teachers that lack content knowledge also lack authority?

Authority- what is it really all about? Hannah Arendt (1954) According to Arendt, there are many controversies circulated around the word ‘authority’. We should define what authority was and not what it is, for she argues that the concept of authority has vanished from the modern/westernised world. The very term is apprehensive and clouded by misunderstandings derived from generations of uneducated individuals. Yet again there is a correlation between politics and that of authority, where Arendt states that authority is initially political in nature. She also raises the undeniable importance of the differences between the conceptions of authority and that of an authoritarian nature. Authority to her originated from the Greek philosopher Plato, where he defined authority as originating from the Greek method of supervising domestic affairs; persuasion and the way in which to handle foreign affairs; violence and force. In the opinion of Arendt, it is evident that to her authority encompass the definitions of persuasion, violence and force based on Greek philosophy. However, it shares the common ground of stability or discipline. She makes mention of a man Machiavelli, who never quite used the term authority but practiced it. Whereas authoritarianism is when force is used to crumble the stability of which that authority is built on. Both terms were coined by the Greeks, however, sanctified by the Romans. Hirst and Peters (1970) Hirst and Peters emphasises on the role of the teacher with regards to the students. The teacher earns authority from the community and that authority should be used to enforce certain rules that are expected from the learners and that those rules enforced should relate to educational purposes. The authoritarian teacher is one that relishes in the giving of orders and formulating particular rules to suit their own needs or status. However, according to Hirst and Peters the complete disregard to enforce rules required for learners to excel in education is illogical. In the 1960′ and 1970’s educational ideologies were explicitly analysed where progressive educational thinkers completely rejected traditional authority, for it was seen as an oppressive force or as Hirst and Peters would state; was a practice of thorough authoritarian nature (Hurn, 1985). However, in the 1980’s schools were renounced by conservatives for completely eradicating the practice of authority in classrooms. Hirst and Peters speaks of the traditional teacher and the progressive teacher. Where the authority of content knowledge was attributed to the traditional teacher and whereas the progressive teachers’ attributes were more acclimatised for the development of children. Thus there should be a balance between the two, as a teacher you cannot be completely traditional for then you lack empathy with students and you cannot be completely progressive for then you will lack classroom management. A teacher should aspire to be in authority, however, disregarding complete authoritarian behaviour. Teachers should see themselves as ‘provisional authorities’; that do not only provide learners with the content knowledge that they require to excel in society but also to stimulate the development of learners with the intention that the learners will ultimately be equip with the necessary skills to manage individually. ‘The good teacher is therefore a person who is always working himself out of a job’, (Hirst and Peters, 1970).

Paulo Freire (1992) Freire communicates authority as being that which can only exist within exercising certain disciplines, be it intellectual or political; however highlighting the fact that it needs to be healthy discipline, which encourages the freedom to disagree if necessary, for authority cannot exist without discipline. Whereas authoritarianism cripples the disciplines of the foundations of authority; it threatens the freedom of decisions and is gained through the internalisation and misuse of authority. For there to be discipline one is required to be able to have the right to formulate one’s individual ideas and be able to exercise them in the appropriate manner under the guidance of authority. The absence of discipline derives from the absence of authority; they can only live together and not as separate entities. He relates the importance of authority and discipline with regards to learners and specifies that if any form of discrimination; for example that which is placed upon a learner by an authoritarian figure onto a country or education, exists against the learners they cannot and will not exercise their right as a citizen. There are clear links between authority, discipline and our education system; authority implies freedom, freedom implies citizenship and citizenship cannot be exercised as a peaceful right if a democratic education cannot be realized apart from an education of and for citizenship. John A.Coleman (1997) Coleman states that on a large basis, authority cannot be entirely conceptualised with a singular direct definition and that for certain sociologists it is a sub-set of a larger concept; power. According to his article; Authority, Power, Leadership: Sociological Understandings, authority is addressed as legitimate power. With that said he also makes reference to other sociologists that refers to authority as both power and persuasion. However, with reference to Max Weber, he distinguishes brilliantly between what power is and what authority is, agreeing that there is a relation, yet both terms encompass their own definitions. Power; ‘encompass the personal characteristics of individuals or groups’ whereas authority refers to ‘social positions or roles’. Coleman explores different ideal types of authority in depth; the traditional authority, the charismatic authority and the rational-legal authority. All the above mentioned concepts are based on research done by Max Weber, who states that traditional authority that are based on established beliefs within a society that lack social change and tends to be conservative, traditional educators mistakenly expect students to obey them simply because of their occupation. Charismatic authority is associated with individuals that hold high prestige and which, according to Weber, is considered a highly unstable form of authority because they are not bound by official rules or laws. A charismatic teacher therefore is based solely on the teachers’ ability to continue to entice students’ needs and interests. Lastly, is the rational-legal authority which is supported by rules and policies based on rational of an institutional bureaucracy, this is where alterations within the system are orderly and rational-legal teachers possess the role of a boss within the classroom. A fascinating statement made by Rahlf Dahrendorf highlighted in Coleman’s article that unravels ones understanding of the terms authority and authoritarian ‘Authority, as distinct from power, is never a relation of generalised control over others’. This statement is interestingly profound and allows the reader to rethink their understanding of the terms; authority and authoritarian. Authority to Coleman, according to Weber, is when a given group of individuals obeys a certain command, whereas authoritarianism is that ‘generalised control over others’ that Dahrendorf speaks of.

Judith Pace & Annette Hemmings (2007) Pace and Hemming’s aim is not to define authority or authoritarianism but to explore the concepts of social theories on that of classroom authority. They understand that authority is poorly understood and for that reason might be completely disregarded in a classroom setting. Their article on Understanding Authority in Classrooms: A Review of Theory, Ideology and Research delves into the depths of what authority entails and how empirical it is in every classroom, with explicit attention to that of authority. They argue that the relationship that lays between the teacher and the students with regards to that of authority is highly unstable that has the potential to crumble at any given time. According to their article, social theories governing our society today distinguish between authority and power, with which authority is so readily confused.it is understood in their article that educational ideologies and even certain political agendas within a society affects that societies views on authority. Agreeing with Coleman’s work with reference to Weber, that authority is ‘the super-ordinates right to command and the subordinates duty to obey’, however, this right and duty derives from a common ground that exits between the individuals involved and serves for the purpose in which ‘exists for the moral order to which both owe allegiance’. Another statement that relates to that of Coleman is the fact that both Pace and Hemming’s agree that authority is a social relationship, referring to social roles or positions, where someone is granted to lead and others agree to follow. This authority cannot exist if there is not a shared sense of moral order or discipline, therefore, students under a shared moral order can and will accept the authority imposed upon them within a classroom setting. Heming’s and Pace, like Coleman used the research of Max Weber on social theories to derive their own understanding of the concepts of authority and its role in classrooms.

How has the political background of South Africa influenced learners’ perception on teacher authority? Now, with the above mentioned educational ideologies and social theories, is there a link between the historical backgrounds of South Africa to that of the learners’ perception on teacher authority within a classroom? Violence among school children and schools can contribute greatly to the loss of teacher authority within a classroom and a school as Ramdass mentions in his article on the challenges facing education in South Africa, and astonishingly enough according to Stabroek News; A crisis of teacher authority in schools, there is indeed a correlation between violence and learners’ perception on authority. The article states that teachers are now protesting to uphold their authority and demanding that the government does something about the violence teachers face within schools on a daily basis, for if nothing is done to eradicate that violence, that the ‘pyramid of authority’ holding the education system together is in danger of being eroded. The call to the Minister of Education has been made and the efforts have been null and void. With that said the mention of Freire’s Letters to Teachers should be reanalysed; where special reference should be made to the practice of authoritarianism and the impact it has on a nation. According to her, authoritarianism can cripple a nation and can cripple every aspect of that nation, especially education. This is evident in the way in which South Africa was governed in the apartheid years, with an iron fist. Although education is critically required, occasionally it is disregarded due to other matters considered important to the authority figure (the South African government) or due to the fact that leaders in those countries misuse the authority placed upon them by the citizens and assume roles as authoritarians, with regards to the way in which apartheid completely disregarded the freedom of the citizens and therefore dismissed the concept of freedom and the people’s right to exercise democracy. Similarly, if a teacher exercises authoritarianism in the classroom and does not use the authority placed upon him or her in a disciplined manner, the learners will question the discipline in the classroom. Authoritarian teachers cripple the freedom of learners to express themselves in the manner in which they see fit, their word is final and there are no discussions with regards to necessary decisions; there is no democracy within that classroom. On the contrary, the practice of authority within a classroom in the correct disciplines will encourage learners to respect the teacher and can lead to their own self-discipline and self-respect within themselves as well (Freire, 1992). The article of Jonathan Jansen; When the tail wags the dog, implies that he agrees with this question. He makes clear arguments that support his view on the aforementioned question, however, provides none to very little theoretical basis for his arguments. He states that the photograph that he saw of a principal being chased by grade 12 students, is a clear depiction of what is wrong with our education system in South Africa today; that there is a complete loss of authority in education. His statement is based on his perception of the type of leadership that is governed by parliament and how the South Africans today inherited a ‘flat democracy’ from their forefathers, where every individual decides on behalf of the country, however, according to him this is not true, for South Africans inherited a country that eludes the concept of decision making on behalf of our country, we as South Africans are under the illusion from our government that we hold the power (authority) to decide what happens to us and our country, ‘that there was no authority that could take the lead in decisions without everyone participating’. A question from his article that has stuck with me and that has baffled me; ‘What if the followers believe they can violently attack or overthrow the leader since they put him there’? This is the dilemma in which South African teachers are faced with today, due to that ‘flat democracy’ we so willingly and eagerly inherited from the ‘white man’. Learners now feel that they have the right to, because of apartheid, to question authority figures without consequence, is this really the democracy that our forefathers fought for? An education system that, amongst other downfalls, is failing to educate learners due to their preconceived misjudgements of the past. Students question the roles of teachers because they do not understand the concept of democracy, the concepts of order or authority within government. They do not understand their own role in a classroom, which allows them to question the role of the teacher as well. Teachers should educate students to understand the hierarchy of order within a society if they want learners to understand their role as an authority figure in a classroom, as Jansen says; firmly without fear. Another article where Jonathan Jansen, the vice chancellor and rector of the University of the Free State, mentions his views on the how the value of education in South Africa has been lost is the article written by Lucy Holborn. In the article Holborn raises a recommendation to fix the problem of which so many students agree on, incorporate school inspectors to monitor teachers, ensuring that they know their content and can teach it appropriately. However, the general secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), Mugwena Maluleke, opposes this recommendation arguing that the incorporation of school inspectors is there to find fault within a school and with the teachers. Their stance harks back to apartheid when the National Party incorporated the use of inspectors to find fault in black schools. The article written by Lucy Holborn; Education in South Africa: Where Did It Go Wrong?, she gives reasons and recommendations as to why South Africa’s education system faces so many challenges post-apartheid. There are three main reasons; the teachers do not know the content knowledge expected from them, the management of the teachers and the outside disruptions experienced out of the school. In Holborn’s article, Johnathen Jansen claims that the Soweto uprising eroded the way in which the learners of today view the concept of teacher authority, ultimately leading to the destruction within our education system presently. Ramdass also makes mention of certain recommendations to aid the education system of South Africa such as; development of skills, curriculum development, policy on schooling, further education and training, education development programmes and the transformation of higher education. The education system in South Africa is a reflection of poor governance since 1994, there is no doubt a lack of skilled teachers and inferior methods incorporated to train those teachers which led to poor policy implementations and thus the complete disregard of teacher authority within a classroom. Based on my opinions mentioned above, I agree with Jansen’s arguments that there is a complete loss of authority in schools due to the incorporation and misguidance of poor policy implementation and the lack of skilled teachers.

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Related links, yesterday and today, on-line version issn 2309-9003 print version issn 2223-0386, y&t n.26 vanderbijlpark dec. 2021, http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2223-0386/2021/n26a2 .

Education and the public good: Foregrounding education in history

University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa [email protected] Orcid 0000-0002-8318-4137

Historians can contribute significantly to education historiography to bolster education transformation. Contemporary scholarship in education, in the main, mostly wrestles with the current dispensation's transformation of education policy endeavours in the post-apartheid era. While there is no substantial or insurmountable disagreement on the education policy objectives in post-apartheid South Africa, much of the contestations seem to arise from how these objectives should be realised to achieve their lofty ideals. This is where learning from history is important. History is not merely concerned with constructing knowledge through relooking the past but also attending to the "selection" and "silences" over time. Among other things, South Africa's history also provides significant insights into how education contributed to developing a first-world economy in the country. This article argues that, because of education's ability to enable social and economic mobility to affect families, communities, and society in general positively, education is a public good that requires historians' involvement and attention. The article also considers the significance of funding education as a public good. Consequently, the paper argues that historians can make a significant contribution to transforming education in their continuous rewriting of history to learn from the past and foreground education as a public good in the past and present for the future.

Keywords : History; Education history; Education historiography; Education transformation; Public good.

Introduction

Through considering the historiography of education in South Africa, this article seeks to demonstrate a concern regarding historians' lack of engagement with the history of education and the disservice this constitutes to the national transformation efforts currently underway in the country. While there have been notable insights into the development of education over time, the continuous challenge of transforming education to meet the needs and demands of a developing South African education landscape often obscures some of the rich and novel scholarship and debates raging in education historiography. Contemporary scholarship, in the main, mostly wrestles with the current dispensation's transformation of education policy endeavours in the post-apartheid era. There is no substantial or insurmountable disagreement on the education policy objectives in post-apartheid South Africa. Much of the contestations seem to arise from realising the lofty ideals encapsulated in these objectives. As this article argues, because of education's ability to enable social and economic mobility, thereby positively affecting families, communities, and society in general, education in South Africa is a public good, albeit this is contrary to views expressed by some scholars in the developed world.

Education is broad and encompasses, i.e., primary, secondary, and post-secondary or tertiary education. However, this article mainly focuses on post-secondary education to illustrate the value, virtue, utility, and significance of education as a public good and its contribution to national development. Given contemporary contestations in the higher education sphere in South Africa, the article also considers the role and importance of higher education funding, particularly for those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, linking this aspect to the challenges of transforming education in South Africa to the seismic changes post-1994. Although this article reiterates "a call to action" for historians previously issued by other scholars, it amplifies and underscores the significance and importance of historians' involvement in the history of education by locating this contribution within the context of education as a public good. Finally, this article does not seek to theorise, discuss or engage what kind of history of education South Africa needs nor what constitutes "good", "proper", or "useful" education history. These are essential concerns that we should address. As alluded to here, historians will attend to them when they enter the fray and bring their formidable intellectual and professional skills and capabilities to bear on the history of education.

Education historiography in South Africa

Quintessentially South African, the history of education can also be read along the pre-colonial, colonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid continuum and its fault lines. The traditional dichotomies of state imposition and control and public opposition or state-driven and market-directed pushes and pulls frame much of the scholarship on the history of education in South Africa. 1 With a few exceptions, the periodisation of education historiography also conforms to the categories present in general South African historiography. Consequently, the history of education can be considered, as suggested by Wessel Visser in 2004, that: "[t]raditionally, historical writings on the history of South Africa has [sic] been divided into broad categories or historiographical schools, namely, a British Imperialist, a settler or colonialist, an Afrikaner nationalist, a liberal, and a revisionist or radical school." Visser further notes that: "[t]he emergence of social history is generally also regarded as a byproduct of the revisionist school, while some historians argue that the emergence of a black nationalist historiographical tradition stemmed partly from the radical approach during the years of apartheid". 2 Though the above framework is not the only way to categorise and periodise South African historiography, earlier education historiography focused overwhelmingly on education's response to the development and imposition of racially segregated and apartheid education by state authorities or other economic and social forces shaping education in society. 3

As indicated earlier, contemporary scholarship mostly wrestles with the transformation of education policy endeavours in the post-1994 context. Notwithstanding this, the utility of this approach continues to be relevant in understanding historical and modern contestations with education in the post-apartheid context. For Jürgen Oelkers and later Michael Cross et.al, "education historiography is not only a question of construction of knowledge but also of selection (of events, names and meanings) and of silences within the history of education". 4 Oelkers sees this predicament as a challenge when he concludes that: "we have no other choice than to rewrite the history of education again and again and to put the process of selection in historiography on as rational a basis as possible". 5

Pre-colonial, South African (pre-British imperialist/colonial-settler historiography) education history scholars recently reached the consensus that formal European education in South Africa can be traced back to 1658, before the official establishment in 1662 of the Dutch East India Company's (DEIC) refreshment station at the Cape. 6 Johannes Seroto postures that "forms of formal and informal teaching and learning existed among the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa before the arrival of the European in the Cape Colony in 1652", 7 which is now referred to as the pre-colonial period in history. According to Seroto, "the children of indigenous peoples in Southern Africa learned in different ways, where in the early years they learned much from their mother and extended family and formally through initiation ceremonies". 8 However, "indigenous education, which was predominantly informal, prevailed before formal and institutionalised education was introduced by the European settlers on their arrival in the Cape". 9

Speaking about European schooling at the Cape, Wolhuter reports that the colonial period, which he dates as 1652 to 1910, was a typically colonial set-up based on racial segregation. The Dutch East India Company established the first formal slave school in 1658. 10 From a very early age, Cape education was characterised by the colonial government's involvement in the education of white children, recruiting teachers for white schools from the Netherlands, and after 1810 from England. 11 Literature on formal school education in South Africa supports the view that, following the colonisation of modern-day South Africa, the first "free" farmers who were allowed to settle in the Cape in 1657 were Dutch before England finally colonised the Cape in 1806. 12 Wolhuter also notes that the later Boer Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State recruited teachers from the Cape Colony and the Netherlands. When the Rev SJ Du Toit became the Superintendent of Education and promulgated the Education Act of 1882, it provided for establishing an institution for the training of teachers and civil servants in Pretoria, the Transvaal capital at the time. Consequently, the institution was opened in 1883 and operated till 1887. Following the Transvaal becoming a British colony in 1902, the colonial administration, being reluctant to continue importing teachers from the Netherlands, established a teacher's training college, the Pretoria Normal College. 13 The Pretoria Normal College was established on 2 September 1902, with its campus in Rissik Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria. Initially an English medium institution, it became an Afrikaans college in 1933. 14

From 1910 to 1948 (Afrikaner Nationalism), also regarded as the pre-apartheid era, was characterised by continued racialised education and the establishment of the national education system. 15 The Union of South Africa government was established in 1910. It was the amalgamation of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal, which had federal dimensions that assigned the responsibility of education for whites to the four provincial governments. 16 During the apartheid era (1948 to 1994), historians describe racialised education as becoming draconian with the introduction of education policies to bolster racially separate and unequal education for the different population groups in the country. Accordingly, the state asserted control over missionary schooling and segregated black education through fragmentation and differentiation of the education system. 17 A host of legislation promulgated by the white minority ruling section of the South African population, generally under the auspices and leadership of the Afrikaner Nationalist government, supported this effort. Seminal education legislation such as the Bantu Education Act of 1953, the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, the Coloured Person's Education Act of 1963, and the Indian Education Act of 1965 were keystone achievements in setting the nature driving the tone of formal education in the country.

These various acts established different departments to operate and navigate the new education landscape. In the case of Bantu Education, the Department of Native Affairs took control of black education; the Department of Coloured Affairs took responsibility for the education of people of mixed descent, and finally, the Department of Indian Affairs took responsibility for the education of persons from Indian descent in the country. 18 The Minister of Native Affairs later renamed the Bantu Administration and Development, drafted the Bantu Education Act. 19 Apart from race, schools and universities were also classified and segregated according to ethnicity. 20 These efforts were not unchallenged or unopposed and formed the bedrock and foundation of education policy, thinking, and practice in South Africa. It resulted in Michael Cross considering the problem of race, gender, location, and authorship as major issues in the South African education history, from the apartheid era to the present. 21

Peter Kallaway noted that there was "curiously little material on the apartheid period from 1948-1994" 22 in education historiography. Cross postulates that the development of the school crisis between 1976 and 1980, triggered by the student uprising against the imposition ofAfrikaans as an instruction medium in schools as part of apartheid education, resulted in many social scientists committing to a more nuanced approach to studying education in South Africa. 23 Cross et al., argue that: "the transition from apartheid society and the process of national reconstruction came to be thought about within the horizon of possibilities different from the rigid paradigmatic tradition in which radical change was conceptualised by the short-lived radical-neo-Marxist school of the 1970s and 1980s in South African education". 24

With the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, the new South African government formulated a national education policy. According to Wolhuter, it was based on the principles of democratisation characterised by active participation by all parties, particularly teachers, pupils/students, parents, and the community. There would be equal education opportunities for all and desegregation, where one of the first steps taken in the field of education should be the collapse of homeland education ministries. The white, Indian, and coloured education ministries would be combined into one National Department of Education. Multiculturalism, had to be established, where the entire education system was to be geared towards realising the potential of the entire population, with the societal objectives of economic development and the moulding of national unity as final goals. 25 Furthermore, Kalie Strydom and Magda Fourie observed that: "the changes in the political sphere and the omens of the demise of apartheid brought to the higher education debate other focus points, such as the conflict of values and interests in higher education; the tension between quality and equality; and the redefinition of the mission of higher education". 26

As can be discerned, these policy objectives directly respond to the historical trajectory of formal education in South Africa, where colonial and apartheid governments sought to achieve the direct opposite of what the new democratic dispensation now aims to achieve. Furthermore, objectives similar to those of the post-apartheid education policy were also integral to the political struggle against colonialism and apartheid of the indigenous, oppressed, and exploited black majority of the South African population in partnership with sympathetic and supportive formations locally and abroad. Though laudable by any measure, these objectives have resulted in remarkable contestations in the modern South African education landscape. Currently, it is a landscape viewed by many as untransformed in terms of the lived experiences of the majority of the historically disadvantaged South Africans - a modern euphemism for black South Africans. They continue to be trapped in the colonial and apartheid geopolitical and spatial constructs of the townships and rural areas in the country and continue to suffer the legacy of the unequal funding of education bequeathed by the previous dispensations.

In his 2012 survey of South African education historiography titled "The forgotten history of South African education", Peter Kallaway, echoing Andy Green, cautions that: "although there are many sound analyses of the fundamental role of mass education in the constitution of 20 th century society and its successes and failures, it can be argued that this story has not fully taken its rightful place as a central aspect of mainstream history, despite numerous attempts by educational historians to chart the field". 27 For Kallaway, what is revealed in his survey of South African historiography, "is that South African historians, whether liberal, Afrikaner nationalist, Africanist, revisionist or those belonging to the social history or popular history traditions, have on the whole not placed education at the centre of the historical picture". 28 This leads him to further caution against what he sees as "the baby and bathwater phenomenon" in contemporary South African historiography and education policy development. Kallaway notes that: "in the South African case, the attempt to characterise the whole history of education as flawed on account of its association with apartheid led to the wholesale abandonment of educational traditions built up over two centuries". 29 Kallaway postulates that it would serve South African historiography and policy development well if "the successes and failures of the post-1994 system are to be understood in terms of the continuity with that past as well as the ruptures and innovations" 30 that occurred during this period.

Kallaway also observed that the period before 1910 proved to be the least researched. The major focus had been on 1910-1948 when the national education system was established. He points out that there was curiously little material on the apartheid period from 1948-1994. 31 Regarding this period, he notes that: "there is a major emphasis on black education and the opposition to Bantu Education, but there is very little consideration of the literature related to the People's Education Movement or any careful exploration of the issues related to 'liberatory education' and the links to worker education in the emergent black unions". 32 Kallaway concludes that: "the 21 s t century [in South Africa] is notable for the lack of attention to history and an unwillingness to see contemporary political culture through the lens of past experience". 33

Akin to some of the effects noted about the 1976 student uprisings on the study of education, 34 more recently, Linda Chisholm et al., observed that "the #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall student campaigns of 2015 and 2016 in South Africa brought into sharp focus the centrality of history to the debate about the decolonisation of the university curriculum". 35 In their study, they note that: "while there has been some research into the nature of the history of curriculum in post-apartheid [sic] South Africa, the nature of the history of education in teacher training has not received a great deal of attention". 36 Their study, which echoes Kallaway's observations noted earlier, revealed "the continued intellectual, academic apartheid that exists in South Africa, and the failure to create a history of education in South Africa that does full justice to the intellectual approaches and research that do exist". 37

As observed earlier, there is no substantial or insurmountable disagreement on the education policy objectives of the post-apartheid South African context, and much of the contestations seem to arise from how these objectives are to be realised. While the first part of this contention may seem located in the technical sphere of policy development and implementation and the second part in the political sphere, nuanced reading of these issues reveals some consensus in the public's view of the value and utility of education. That is education is a "public good" that needs to be harnessed to address the inequalities bequeathed by the colonial and apartheid legacies. As this article seeks to demonstrate, this view is also informed by the historical trajectory of the development and evolution of formal education in South Africa. Supporting this notion, Strydom and Fourie confirm that the higher education system in post-apartheid South Africa is characterised by, among other things,

an unmatched obligation, which has not been adequately fulfilled, to help lay the foundations of a critical civil society, with a culture of public debate and tolerance which accommodates differences and competing interests. It has to do much more, both within its own institutions and through its influence on the broader community, to strengthen the democratic ethos, the sense of common citizenship and commitment to a common good. 38

In her South African university history overview, Bronwyn Strydom of the University of South Africa notes that "[South African university] history has a long tradition of commemorative writing which, while breaking ground in terms of the recording of the history of individual institutions, does not always conform to historical methodology or critical distance". 39 Strydom further notes that "South African universities have attracted some scholarly attention, especially more recently, and this new interest has also demonstrated the value of the historical study of institutions of higher education". 40

The lack of involvement of historians in documenting the history of education is evident. It is critical in ensuring a deeper appreciation of the historical fault lines in the development of education in the modern context with possibly devastating consequences for the societal transformation project in contemporary South Africa. It also demonstrates the challenges and opportunities historians have in foregrounding education history to assist and support education policy development in addressing the historically generated disjuncture in education currently being attended to as modern challenges void of antecedents. The continuities and breaks in education policy development over the past decades in South Africa are critical in ensuring meaningful interventions with a greater chance of success in transforming education as a public good for the benefit of society in general and the historically disadvantaged in particular.

The value of education as a public good

As indicated earlier, while education encompasses primary, secondary, and post-secondary education, this article focuses mainly on post-secondary education. The purpose is to illustrate the concerns, contestations, opportunities, and implications for education historians to enable social and economic mobility and positively affect families, communities, and society in general, which is a crucial characteristic leading to education being viewed as a public good. However, and like so much else, the idea that education is a public good enjoys much debate in contemporary society and academic literature..

In his Edmund Rich Memorial Lecture at Oxford University in 1995, the economist Richard Smethurst argued that education is neither solely a public nor a private good. For Smethurst, it is both. Some education is overwhelmingly a public good as its benefits accrue very widely to society and the individual. Simultaneously, while benefiting society, some education offers more overwhelming benefits to the individual than society. 41 Jan Polcyn offered another treatise in 2015 of "Education as a public good" in the Bulletin of the Berdyansk University of Management and Business. 42 However, for economists, as argued by Jane Shaw earlier in 2010, a public good is not simply "good for the public". 43 It is also something that benefits many people, including those who do not pay for it. Advanced education falls in this category as fostering greater productivity and innovation, improving the lives of everyone, not just those who bought the education. 44

Education carries with it the implications of improving the lives of individuals, enabling their social and economic mobility, which in turn benefits the broader society. This particular feature, i.e., individual before social benefits, seems to trouble the waters somewhat in the debate about whether education is a public good or not. From a business perspective, education is simply a private good for which the individual seeking it must pay. On the other hand, education as a public good is public investment and the state's responsibility.

Furthermore, in Europe, education has also been regarded as a transnational (global) good. In this context, treating education as a public good allows for a strategic perspective on the benefits of education. On the one hand, it leads to the personal development of the individual, and, on the other, it provides global benefits for whole societies under the inductive effects of education because education undoubtedly contributes to the creation of social capital, which is treated as public, or at least a quasi-public, good. 45 Furthermore, the ministers of the European Union at a summit on higher education in Prague in 2001 jointly declared that higher education is "a public good" and "a public responsibility". They further stated that education, especially higher education, was considered one of the most important public goods and, as such, a necessity and responsibility of the state. 46

In 2016 Gareth Williams from the University College London argued that the financial, socio-political, and ideological pressures on the public fiscus have contributed to replacing higher education as a public service, with it being considered a marketable commodity, subject to the laws of supply and demand by individuals and organised groups. 47 In this regard, the focus of the debate is on how higher education should be paid for, 48 instead of its value and meaning to society, particularly given the competition of other services on the public fiscus.

This debate has adopted a different tone in Africa. Mainstream, Western, higher education concepts and the public good, underpinned by particular understandings of higher education's nature and form and how knowledge is acquired, developed, and disseminated, are far removed from the reality of highly unequal, socially stratified, and politically complex societies within which higher education is often deeply embedded. 49 In 2008, Mahmood Mamdani traced the debate on education as a public good in Africa to the "Bretton Woods Institutions 50 and the Assault on the Developmentalist University" of postcolonial Africa. Here the "World Bank began with a frontal assault on African universities at a conference of Vice Chancellors of African universities that it called in Harare in 1986". 51 Mamdani observed that "the [World] Bank had a substantial critique of the developmentalist university [which led it to conclude] that the beneficiaries should share a significant part of the cost of higher education and that the state should reduce [its] funding to higher education". 52 Mamdani proffers that "overall, the Bank framed a debate in which the private and the public, the market and the state, were seen more as alternatives rather than complementaries between which there needed to be appropriate relations". 53

However, in her introduction to Higher education for the public good: Views from the South? 54 Brenda Leibowitz of the University of Johannesburg noted that: "[a]ll policy statements emanating from the South African state about higher education stress the imperative to transform education so that it becomes more equitable in terms ofparticipation and governance, and so it contributes to the public good and social justice". 55 Leibowitz further indicated that, for South Africa, the public good of education was concerned "with participatory parity and equality, not the privileged and wealthy administering charity to the marginalised". 56 Joy Papier, in her 2014 review of Higher education for the public good: Views from the South, noted that rather than the "public good" being an esoteric notion, the book served to concretise the concept, through its combination of philosophical and empirical contributions. 57

In 2018, Elaine Unterhalter from the University College London and her colleagues further noted that there seem to be two rather distinct ways in which higher education and the public good have been conceptualised. In the first, higher education is "instrumental" in shaping a version of the public good where its qualifications, knowledge production, innovation, development of the professional classes, and expertise are perceived to lead to particular manifestations of public good, delineated as economic, social, political or cultural. The second is higher education as "intrinsic", where the intellectual, physical, and cultural experiences enabled through higher education express and enact the public good, e.g., prejudice reduction, democratisation, critical thinking, and active citizenship. 58 A reconceptualisation of the public was required in these contexts and some challenge to contemporary conceptualisations of the private, given the strong obligations of individuals to extended families and the sharing of the benefits of higher education amongst their communities of origin. 59

There are visible shifts in the international community regarding who should pay for higher education. It suggests a shift from higher education being a public good, for which the state should be responsible, to being a private good for which the individual seeking such education should be accountable. In Africa there are debates about the public good of higher education that seek to reconceptualise the notion and contextual meaning and implications of this concept for the African experience. 60 It is due to several reasons, which, among other things, are rooted in South Africa's history with higher education and the recent massive transformation of South African society post-1994. Furthermore, and different from "the public good often [being] defined in material terms, as if it is visible, countable or weighable, [...] the public good is associated with how people or groups think and behave". 61

The legacy of apartheid is an unequal society based on race and ethnic differences promulgated by statutes in the pre-1994 dispensation. There have not yet been debates on who must foot the bill for equity, equality, and access to higher education for those historically and deliberately barred from such access - despite the fact that the state is responsible for transforming South African society and addressing the historic disadvantages visited on the black majority of its citizens. Current debates grapple with the transformation of the higher education system and improving access for the majority of the traditionally excluded populations in the country. It is quite possible that sometime in the future, with the appropriate massification of the system, the debate on who must pay for higher education might also rear its head in South African society. Although there is consensus that the state is responsible for providing higher education to the historically disadvantaged community members, the issues are to what extent and how well this should happen.

In the context of this article, it is critical to note that, though education as a public good is currently being debated globally, in South Africa and on the African continent, education seems to be considered a public good. Though this can largely be attributed to education's ability to transform people and society from the ravages of colonialism and apartheid, it was also considered a public good in the context of the colonial and apartheid eras in South Africa, albeit with a clear focus on the good being for white South Africans only. Accordingly, the communities of the South 62 are engaged in efforts to reconceptualise the public and the private aspects of education as a public good with the view to its utility for social development and transformation, which are critical challenges for these communities. Furthermore, the 2015 to 2018 movements driven by the #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall illustrated, among other contestations, a view of a large segment of South African society that higher education should be accessible to the historically disadvantaged populations in the country. Consequently, on 16 December 2017, Reconciliation Day in South Africa, the then South African President, Jacob Zuma announced that government would subsidise free higher education for poor and working-class students. 63 Responding to President Cyril Ramaphosa's State of the Nation Address (SONA) of 2019, the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology, Dr Blade Nzimande, reported that: "In line with the President's focus, over the next 10-year period our department will focus on the effectiveness and expansion of the new bursary scheme in both the university and TVET college sectors [and confirmed that s]tudents from families earning less than R350 000 per annum [will] receive comprehensive support in the form of a bursary for the duration of their studies. 64

Given the challenges of transformation in the higher education sector in South Africa, a fundamental impediment is a reality that "while South Africa's economy [may be] the largest in Africa, it significantly lags behind [that of] developed nations, and this restricts the extent to which it can fund public higher education. Furthermore, funding for public higher education in South Africa is comparatively lower than in countries at a similar stage of economic development". 65 Consequently, in agreement with Leibowitz, one of the severe limitations "of the sector, as well as a motivating force for change, is the degree of financial inequality between higher education institutions and between individuals [...] and the low and skewed participation of the appropriate cohort of 18-24-year olds by race". 66

Conclusion: A call to arms for historians

Having considered the historiography of education in South Africa and the conceptualisation of education as a public good, it is clear that South African education will be wrestling with the ghost of its colonial and apartheid legacies for the foreseeable future. It is also clear that centering education history in these debates is critical in ensuring that the development and continuous evolution of education policy and practice benefit from the successes and failures of education in the country, from the pre-colonial to the colonial/apartheid era, right up to the post-apartheid context. The current state of education historiography also provides opportunities for renewed engagement with the history of education with a view to a fuller, more complex, and nuanced understanding of precisely how South Africa was able to achieve a first-world education status while simultaneously subjecting the majority of its citizens to education backwardness that threatens the embedding and development of a meaningful democratic dispensation in the post-apartheid context. Taking up Oelkers's call to arms for historians, we need to consider, foreground, and rewrite the history of education. This could perhaps assist in developing meaningful solutions to South Africa's pressing and serious policy challenges going into the new and unchartered future.

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"Higher education for the public good: Views from the south", Journal of Student Affairs in Africa, 2(1), 2014, p. 89. 58 E Unterhalter et al., "Conceptualising higher education and the public good", (Paper, CIES conference in Mexico City, March 2018), p. 18. 59 E Unterhalter et.al, "Conceptualising (Paper, CIES conference in Mexico City, March 2018), p. 21. 60 B Leibowitz, (ed.), "Introduction", Higher education for the public good: Views from the South, (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2012), p. xix. 61 B Leibowitz, (ed.), "Introduction", Higher educationfor the public good: p. xxii. 62 According to David Slater in his inaugural address at Loughborough University in the UK in 1995, the terms "North/South" are categorisations that "have been employed within the interpretative arena to draw our attention to the nature of global disparities", whose usage raises significant questions concerning the representation of the other in international relations. For instance, they can encourage us to examine the dominant forms of enframing non-Western others that have been deployed across a long sweep of geopolitical history-D. Slater. "Geopolitical imaginations across the north-south divide: issues of difference, development and power", Political Geography, 16(8), 1997, p. 634. 63 Z Areff & D Spies, "Zuma announces free higher education for poor and working class students", News24, 16 December 2017. 64 BE Nzimande, "A Dream for a better South Africa", (Address, Minister of higher education, science and technology, 2019 State of the nation address debate), 25 Jun 2019. Available at https://www.gov.za/speeches/minister-nzimande-debate-state-national-address-25-jun-2019-0000 Accessed on 30 June 2019. 65 I Scott, "First-year experience as terrain of failure or platform for development? Critical choices for higher education" B Leibowitz, S van Schalkwyk, and A van der Merwe, (eds.), Focus on first-year success: Perspectives emergingfrom South Africa and beyond. (Stellenbosch: Sun Media Press, 2009), p. 20. 66 B Leibowitz, (ed.), "Introduction", Higher educationfor the public good: p. xix.

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The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces

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2 The Transformation of South Africa’s System of Basic Education

Published: September 2018
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As background to the rest of the book, the chapter describes and analyses the main structural transformations that took place in post-apartheid education in South Africa. The chapter provides analytical context to the rest of the book. It focuses on three key transformations: governance, school funding, and curriculum. For each, the chapter provides historical background, describes the transformation in some depth, and attempts to answer whether the transformation ‘worked’, and in what sense. The chapter concludes that some of the transformations worked, in that they were actually implemented and had some of (in some cases, such as finance, most of) the immediate intended impact (e.g. increase in equity of resource allocation). In some cases, such as curricular change, the immediate impact was elusive. The chapter concludes that the transformations have not yet had the desired impact in terms of either average achievement or equality achievement, but there are hopeful signs.

2.1 Introduction

Since 1994, South Africa’s education sector has undergone a process of far-reaching transformation. The principal goal of the research presented in this book is to explore at the micro level some political and institutional dimensions of this transformation. However, these micro-level dynamics played out within a broader context of far-reaching change—and are best understood in the context of that change. The aim of this chapter is to provide the requisite background on this broader context.

The transformations wrought by the ANC government, and its civil society partners, on South Africa’s education system in the mid-1990s could be argued to be among the most far-reaching of the second half of the twentieth century anywhere in the world. Nineteen administrative racial systems had to be joined and then re-shaped into nine geographical provinces; funding had to be put on a rational footing that did not provide white children with ten times as much per-child support as African children; large-scale ambition had to be tempered against fiscal realities; salary scales had to be unified; curricula revamped; boundaries between provinces re-established; capital planning systems streamlined; exam systems re-calibrated; and procurement, tendering, and payroll systems unified. The key changes all took place within a few critical years, between roughly 1995 and 1998.

This chapter describes these transformations, suggests some reasons for the key decisions, and details some of what the results for post-apartheid South Africa have been. We do not purport to assess whether other decisions might have produced a better outcome; rather, we argue that the most important transformation choices were to a large degree driven by circumstances, as perceived at the time. The set of circumstances, to be explored as hypotheses that determined the transformational policy choices, include:

The felt need to transform education sector governance by decentralizing certain elements of decision-making to both new provinces and schools. As section 2.3 details, these decisions were not always taken for purely technocratic reasons. Some were political compromises needed to keep important social groups involved in governing the country by giving them a share of the governance, especially over their own spheres of action.

The broader fiscal context which prevailed as of the end of apartheid and the dawn of democracy, discussed in section 2.4. These did not concern only fiscal aggregates, but also the fact that there were other social sectors, affected by apartheid inattention, that were perceived to be in a far sorrier state than education, at least judging from an enrolment criterion and in comparison with other countries.

The necessity of transforming the education curriculum—both to expunge the apartheid legacy, and in response to strong global trends in professional opinion on ‘what works’ in education, as mediated by South African intellectuals, sometimes isolated, as they were, by apartheid sanctions and relative lack of intellectual exchange with the rest of the world during the height of the sanctions in the 1980s and early 1990s. How this played out in practice—and some of the implications for learning outcomes—is the focus of section 2.5.

Before turning to the details of these transformations, we first set the stage by describing the legacy of extreme dualism that was a consequence of South Africa’s dismal apartheid history.

2.2 South Africa’s Education Sector—A Legacy of Dualism

Though it is fairly common to look for the origins of South Africa’s education problems under the explicit apartheid policies that were introduced in the late 1940s, and culminating in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, in reality the attitudes, policies, and issue-treatment that determine the dynamics of the system until the end of the twentieth century go back at least three centuries—in fact, nearly all the way back to the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652. In this brief historical sketch we pause at the very beginning, 300 years ago, just to ‘prove’ how deeply ingrained and historical the problems are; we then ‘fast forward’ to the formalism of apartheid in the 1940s and 1950s, and end up with a look at the situation towards the end of apartheid, providing a quick snapshot of the result of the dynamics of forces over 300 years.

2.2.1 Some Deep Background

The first school in the Cape Colony was started in 1658, just six years after the founding of the colony. As it happens, this coincided with the first arrival of slaves from outside the Cape itself. Already then, van Riebeeck (Commander of the Cape Colony from 1652 to 1662) ‘saw the need to establish an institution…[that] would teach slaves sufficient linguistic skills, in order to promote a greater understanding of their master’s orders…In addition, these slaves would also be indoctrinated in their master’s religion, which would teach them the values of servitude, discipline, and obedience’ (Molteno, 1984 : 45, cited in Moore, 2015 : 20). (Of course, this may not have been so different from how European children were schooled in those days, either in Europe or in the Cape—the influences of Montaigne and Comenius would have been distant indeed. The more interesting point is that this would be done in separate institutions which would presumably allow different interpretations for these curricular values—some for citizens, others for slaves—and interpretation is everything.) The first officially separated building would be opened in 1685 (Moore, 2015 : 20). Later, (some) missionary schools might have had a relatively more humanistic attitude towards education. But, interestingly, this led to conflict with trekboer policies which forbade missionary activities in the Eastern Cape, as a way to not ‘disseminate unsettling ideas of human equality as taught in [one presumes some] missionary schools’ (Moore, 2015 : 21, citing Welsh, 2000 : 109).

2.2.2 Fast-Forward 300 Years

Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the ‘history’ of (African, or in general) education policy in South Africa has to be interpreted as a quilt of various colours, and tendencies, where big ‘Policy’ can only be seen as the accretion of the policies of many different, localized, time-bound policies of particular bodies, some official, some not (e.g. missions). Even so, the tendency for education for Africans to be distinct and inferior, often by design, was self-evident to even casual observers working from the 1960s onward. But it is only in the early 1950s that ‘policy history’ becomes much more easily interpretable via the documentary evidence—the historical documentation leaves no doubt as to the intent of policy, and by then one can now mean Policy with a capital ‘P’—though even so, academics find ways to disagree about ‘deep’ motivations. Some ascribe high apartheid policy to be mostly aimed at the limitation of Africans to be providers of cheap, relatively unskilled labour; others ascribe it to serving the needs of apartness first and foremost. But in the end, the impact is similar.

The guiding policy document was the Bantu Education Act, passed in 1953. This Act, while decisive for education, embodied much of what was criticized about apartheid in general. Under the guise of providing the opportunity for separate development in separate ‘nations,’ it laid out a framework of centralized control, bureaucracy, physical apartness, inferior funding, and paternalism. In the words which many anti-apartheid activists have engraved in their minds, F. W. Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid, noted in a Senate speech in regard to the Bantu Education Act: ‘There is no space for him [the “Native”] in the European Community above certain forms of labour. For this reason it is of no avail for him to receive training which has its aim in the absorption of the European Community, where he cannot be absorbed. Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze’ (Maree, 1984 : 149).

According to one of its key tenets, the Act centralized control of Native Education in the Department of Native Affairs. Mission schools, whose curricular offerings were seen as suspect by the new apartheid government, were brought under the control of the state, and subsidies were eliminated, forcing many to close down. Efforts to create ‘Bantustans’ (quasi-independent ‘reservations’ or ‘homelands’) were initiated in the 1950s. These entities were theoretically able to devise their own education systems, but in fact largely operated in accordance with Bantu Education. Indeed, the intention behind the creation of the Bantustans can be seen as mirroring the Bantu education curriculum: ‘to limit and reorient African political, economic and social aspirations away from a common political and economic life and towards a separated, rurally-oriented, ethnically-based life’ (Chisholm, 2013 : 408). In addition, it would be soon discovered, the Bantustans offered abundant opportunities for populist and patron–client politics. Under the guise of separate development, for instance, high schools were created in the Bantustans, but not so much in the areas where Africans lived within the Republic of South Africa ‘proper’ (though later this policy was rescinded); similarly, each Bantustan was to be given a teacher training college.

Under this legislative regime, per student funding for black schools was much lower than that for other ethnic groups, school feeding disappeared and the state largely placed the burden of the costs of the expansion of schooling on local black communities themselves. Hartshorne ( 1981 ) gives an indication of the inequalities of the system. In 1969, the gap between the unit cost of black and white education reached its widest, at a ratio of 20:1 white to black. At the same time as financing of black education was being squeezed, the government attempted to increase enrolment. In 1972, responding to the crisis in African schooling, the structure of financing changed, and slowly per capita spending differences between black and white children were reduced. However, little additional funding reached primary schools, although in some provinces there was a significant reduction in the number of double-shift schools. Although some gains were made in the retention of children in primary school, quality remained dire. Schooling was further disrupted through the late seventies in widespread student protest action, reaching a climax in the 1976 Soweto school uprising.

In the 1980s, under P. W. Botha, there was an effort to ‘modernize’ apartheid education, largely in response to human capital demands. This was a period of great expansion of schooling, with large increases in African enrolments in both primary and secondary schools. By 1985 the number of secondary students was four-fold that of 1975; 76 per cent of children aged 5–14 were enrolled in primary school (Unterhalter, 1991 : 39). Enrolments, expenditure and the number of African matric passes continued to increase over the 1980s. By the late 1980s the ratio of white to black spending had been decreased to 1:6, although with enormous variations within the ‘black’ category (see below).

Changes in curriculum over the course of apartheid largely mapped onto the shifts in broader ideological discourses and the shifting economic context of the rising and declining apartheid state. Curriculum broadly moved from a culturally oriented curriculum, with a strong emphasis on content and education for the rural, racially distinct ‘native’ and manual labourer in the 1930s and 40s, to a progressively more technicist orientation, and an emphasis on vocational education and the development of skills for a modernising economy. From early on, however, different curriculum knowledge was distributed to different race groups less through different syllabuses and more through different institutionalized forms of provision, especially the lack of broad subject offerings, teaching resources, and qualified teachers in schools for black, coloured, and Indian students.

Schools were governed through nineteen racially separated departments of education for different racial and geographical groupings. Information systems were poor, examination systems dysfunctional and often corrupt, and a draconian inspectorate system was the only accountability and performance management mechanism within the system (Swartz, 2004 ). The Hunter Report (DOE, 1996 ) showed the dismal state of school infrastructure in 1995 after years of neglect. Increasingly, and especially after 1976, black schools, in particular those in urban areas, were largely dysfunctional, the material conditions deplorable, and teacher morale decimated. The apartheid-based curriculum was rejected, and any progressive or state-driven reform became unacceptable. Inspectors were driven from schools. Exams were regarded as illegitimate. Especially in urban areas, student protest action made many schools ungovernable in this wide-scale rejection of apartheid schooling.

2.2.3 Educational Inputs and Outcomes at the Dawn of Democracy

The educational inputs and outcomes at the end of apartheid were a legacy of inequity and, not often noted, also inefficiency. These views influenced important technocrats in the new government. A perspective on both inefficiency and inequity is provided by Figure 2.1 , which shows both expenditure per student in 1990, and a simple ‘instantaneous’ indicator of internal school efficiency, namely the ratio of enrolment in Standard 5 (Grade 7, the last grade of primary) to enrolment in SSA (Grade 1 in the new parlance as an informal measure of the ‘survival rate’ to Standard 5). The results of the relationship are graphed in Figure 2.1 . 1 As the figure shows, there were huge differences in spending per pupil across the systems (far from the ‘5 to 1’ that is often noted with regard to White/African in general)—with the massive additional per pupil spending going to white schools doing nothing to increase ‘survival’ rates. With no comparative data available at the time on learning outcomes, this led some observers at the time to question whether the ‘white windfall’ was achieving much beyond providing pleasant surroundings and ‘posh’ infrastructure.

School efficiency by racial department towards end of apartheid

Aside from the implicit efficiency critique of having to spend so much more on white schools than seemed strictly necessary, there is the equity or equality critique of spending so little on the poor schools, an issue to which we return in section 2.3.

Matric exams are also revealing. Cronje ( 2010 ), using data from the Institute of Race Relations, tracked the performance of black African matric pupils from 1955 to 2008/09. In 1955, only 598 black Africans sat for their matric exams and only 259 achieved a pass. Through the 1960s, the number of black Africans sitting the matric exam increased rapidly, as did the proportions of those pupils obtaining passes and university entrance passes. By 1970, 2,846 black Africans wrote matric and of this group, 1,865 (or 65.2 per cent) passed and 1,103 (or 35.6 per cent) achieved a university entrance pass. The 1960s had therefore seen significant increases in the number of black Africans writing their matric exams. In 1980, 29,973 black African pupils wrote matric. In 1985, 82,815 wrote and by 1990 the number of black African pupils writing matric had rocketed to 255,669. At the same time, however, and through the 1980s and early 1990s, the pass rate and university exemption rate began to fall. In 1993 the pass rate touched a record low of 37 per cent and the exemption rate bottomed out at 8 per cent. The decline in the pass rate is generally attributed to increasingly disrupted schooling through the 1980s, mainly due to political struggle and the breakdown in the culture of learning and teaching in most schools. Some spoke of a ‘lost generation’ of youth who had forgone years of schooling in service of the struggle.

Figure 2.2 extends the analysis by trying to compare not just matric pass rates, but by taking into account the percentage of pupils who reached Standard 10 (Grade 12 in modern parlance). In that sense, what cognitive disadvantage had apartheid education created for the least advantaged in society, as measurable towards the end of apartheid (the early 1990s)? This question is more difficult to answer than it might appear at first. Looking only at the matric pass rates (Senior Certificate Examination pass rates) is not enough, because the proportion who even made it through to Grade 12 varies a lot by population group. To get at that, one might rely on data about persistence in school. But surveys tended not to ask, of those attending school, which grade they were in, and asked instead the highest grade achieved ever, which creates a timing issue. It is difficult to derive completely clear answers, but one can derive a range of estimates of advantage, triangulating various sources. Figure 2.2 , which focuses on the extremes of whites and Africans so as to unclutter the graphics, shows a range of interpretations. Panel A in Figure 2.2 shows the percentage of twenty-one-year-olds having achieved Standard 10 (Grade 12 in today’s parlance), plus various certificates or higher. It shows that for the white population, this was 91 per cent, while for the African population the percentage was 55 per cent: a 1.65 ratio (91/55) in advantage for whites. The 55 per cent strikes us as a little high, but not extremely so, as Panel B confirms. But, in any case, Panel A has the advantage that all the data come from a single source. Panel B shows decrements in percentages achieving certain ‘bars’ according to increments in quality or ‘demandingness’ of those bars. The first two columns show the ratio of enrolment in Standard 10 in 1994 to population of eighteen-year-olds for Africans and whites. In addition, data for senior certificate passes and exemptions were obtained for the early 1990s. Applying the pass rates to the first two columns and the exemption rates to the same two columns gives all the other values. According to these data, whites had advantages over Africans of 1.41, 3.3, and 5.9 respectively, depending on how high the bar in question was. All this provides less optimistic conclusions than the usual pass/writer conception of the pass rate, as the denominator is not those who sit or write the exam, but the whole population, and thus takes into account dropping out prior to Grade 12. A grosso modo , the white/African difference was about 4 to 1 at the end of apartheid.

Educational success, by race, as proportion of populations

This disparity cannot be attributed to differential labour market returns from passing matric; numerous studies have shown that rates of return to secondary and tertiary education range from about 10 per cent to 18 per cent, are similar for whites and Africans (actually higher for Africans), and the returns from post-secondary education are relatively high (Bhorat, 2000 ; Crouch, 1996 ; Mwabu and Schultz, 1996 ). The differential access to matric was therefore a socially inefficient and inequitable phenomenon, depriving society and individuals of access to production and income.

Further insight into the South African patterns of access to education at the dawn of democracy is provided by a comparison for 1989–94 with a selected group of international comparators. 3 As Figure 2.3 shows, relative to these comparators, South Africa was a little—not hugely—skewed, but in ways that are revealing of the racial differences. South Africa’s access to primary education was, at 115 per cent, above the ‘efficient’ maximum for the age cohort—a sign of low quality in the early grades particularly in the African parts of the system, which induced repetition and excess enrolment. Some provinces, largely those where Bantustans had been located, had Grade 1 enrolments which were more than 50 per cent above the age cohort. Secondary enrolment was low in comparison with other countries, but was rapidly (one could say more rapidly than quality could keep up with) catching up (especially in the African portions of the system) and had essentially caught up by 1994. However, the low pass rates highlighted above resulted in a low tertiary enrolment rate relative to the comparators.

Comparative performance of South Africa on access to education

2.3 Transforming Education Sector Governance

The 1996 the South African Schools Act (SASA) and the new Constitution (1996) both transformed radically the institutional arrangements governing the country’s system of education. It replaced the pre-existing, fragmented and racially ordered institutional arrangements with a unified, multi-tiered system:

The national (central) level was assigned responsibility for policymaking, for resourcing the system, and for setting the overall regulatory framework.

The provincial level was assigned responsibility for implementation—spending the budgetary resources made available from the centre, and employing the teachers, administrators, and other personnel who comprised the vast majority of employees in the system.

Substantial school-level responsibilities (including the recruitment of the school principal and senior teachers) were assigned to school-governing bodies (SGBs) in which parents were required to be in the majority.

This transformation in the structure of governance seemingly was consistent with both a technocratic and a political logic. The apartheid state was seen by new technocrats as not only unjust, but also inefficient in its racial decentralization combined with administrative centralization. Decentralization of power, in the framework of a new Constitution and, in the education sector, a new Schools Act, along with a fiscal framework to go along with it (the ‘equitable shares formula’ and the ‘school funding norms’, on which more in section 2.4 ), were seen as a way to both load-shed some responsibility for finances, encourage important social groups to ‘keep skin in the game’, and encourage sub-national levels of government (all the way down to the school) to take substantial responsibility for decisions. Two funding contrasts between SASA and the Bantu Education Act (and its remnants) are especially noteworthy: in the new South Africa, poorer schools would be supported out of the central fiscus (through inter-governmental transfers and the requirements of the school funding norms), instead of depending on supposedly local taxes; and independent schools which attended to the relatively poor and maintained certain quality levels would be funded, instead of deprived of funding as the mission schools had been.

At the time when South Africa’s new education sector governance arrangements were put in place, there was a strong reformist impulse worldwide for downward delegation of education governance to subnational and school levels 4 (e.g. Bray, 1996 ; Fiske, 1996 ; Patrinos and Ariasingam, 1997 ). Even so, a narrowly technocratic perspective is misleading. The South African Schools Act (SASA) was promulgated in the same year in which the country’s final constitution was formally approved. Indeed, the new institutional arrangements for South Africa’s school system aligned well with broader political imperatives which were at the heart of South Africa’s 1994 transition from apartheid to constitutional democracy.

South Africa’s extraordinary transition from racist, apartheid minority rule to a new competitive, rule-of-law based political settlement was one of the most inspiring democratic miracles of the 1990s (a decade of many inspiring democratic miracles). En route to a democratic election in 1994, and the promulgation of a new constitution in 1996, the apartheid-era governing National Party agreed to give up its stranglehold on power; the exiled African National Congress agreed to end its armed struggle and pursue a negotiated settlement; and multiple other protagonists, including large-scale organized business, played influential roles in facilitating the transition. The complex story of what brought these protagonists to the table, and how they reached agreement, has been well told elsewhere 5 and goes way beyond the scope of the present exercise. For present purposes, the crucial insight is that the institutional arrangements incorporated into SASA were explicitly designed to be responsive to the central concerns vis-à-vis the education sector of both black South Africans who were about to become the majority in the emerging constitutional democracy, and white South Africans who were negotiating away their monopoly control over government.

The African National Congress was a mass-based political party, committed to ending South Africa’s system of racial discrimination. In 1994, it received a sweeping electoral mandate, winning almost 63 per cent of the vote nationally. Universal access to education, the move to non-racial institutions in the sector, and the elimination of racially discriminatory practices in the allocation of public funds were all non-negotiable political imperatives. As subsequent sections of this chapter will detail, all of these indeed were achieved under the new institutional arrangement for the sector established by SASA.

For white South Africans, a central concern was agreement on a system of governance which could sustain the quality of the public 6 schools which historically had served their children. The institutional arrangements laid out in SASA were responsive to these concerns in two ways. First, consistent with the broader constitutional logic of the political settlement, the delegation of substantial authority to nine provinces served as a check on at least some aspects of discretionary decision-making by central government. The second, more direct way in which the concerns of the white minority were addressed was via the delegation of substantial authority to the school level. This delegation included, in subsequent regulation, the ability to vote, at the local level, fees to be paid by parents at school level, and for these fees to stay at school level and to be used there with considerable discretion, including the appointment of extra teachers.

SASA (and the South African constitution more broadly) incorporated an overarching principle of non-racialism in admissions policy—although the details were left ambiguous as to how decisions should be made regarding who had the right to attend individual schools for which there was more demand than available places. But beyond this, parents of children in elite public schools (which historically had served the white minority) were well-placed to leverage the authority granted to SGBs to ensure that the schools would remain well managed. Further, as noted, the autonomy provided by SASA included the right to top up public funds with self-financing by the parent body—ensuring that elite schools need not be starved of resources as a result of the racial equalization (indeed, the pro-poor skewing) of certain public expenditures.

To be sure, keeping middle class and elite children in the system was not only in the interests of the relatively privileged minority. There is strong evidence from around the world that ensuring that multiple classes (not only children of the poor) are served by a public system is a crucial buttress for the system’s efficiency and budgetary defence. Further, both delegation to provinces, and participatory school-level governance aligned well rhetorically with the embrace by all parties of the principles of constitutional, democratic governance. In practice, though, as this book explores in detail, the gap was substantial between this rhetorical alignment and the reality of the challenges of governing the education sector in a way which served effectively the disproportionately poor majority of the country’s citizens. And the evidence in Chapters 8–10 suggests that efforts to turn this rhetorical embrace of participation into genuine empowerment of parents and communities, beyond the already-empowered elites, were disappointingly scant.

2.4 Transforming Education Financing

Compared to other upper-middle income countries (UMICs), particularly those that went on to grow robustly, South Africa’s finances were in a dismal state in the period roughly five years before the new government took power. 7

The economy was not growing. In the period 1990 to 1994, immediately preceding the start of the democratic government, South Africa’s economy shrank at an average annual rate of −2.2 per cent, while comparators’ economies grew at 1.8 per cent: a 4-percentage point difference.

The fiscal deficit was high. In the same period, South Africa’s deficit was, on average, 5.9 per cent of GDP; that of its comparators was 0.9 per cent of GDP. South Africa’s deficit peaked at 9 per cent in 1993—it was the highest of any of the comparator countries in that year.

Because debt was accumulating, interest payments as a proportion of total government expense were high, and rising fast. Payments as a proportion of government expense were 15 per cent in South Africa, only 9 per cent in the comparator countries. What’s worse, in South Africa they were rising by half of a percentage point per year, whereas in the comparator countries, interest payments were going down by 1.3 percentage points per year.

Apartheid had left in its wake some urgent social crises outside the education sector. Under-five mortality rates were 183 per cent higher in South Africa than in the comparator countries, and were worsening rapidly. By contrast, as noted earlier, there was already universal access to primary education, and in education the percentage of the population enrolled in secondary education was only a little lower in South Africa than in comparator countries (70 per cent versus 83 per cent), and was growing rapidly.

In short, as detailed further below, relative to other UMICs, South Africa’s fiscal effort in education was relatively high, and enrolment already high. Given the other economic and social challenges, and a pervasive sense (notably including on the part of some influential public officials 8 ) that resources for education were not well used, it followed that there would be no ‘end-of-apartheid’ dividend in terms of increases in aggregate public spending on education relative to GDP. The overwhelming fiscal challenge was to put in place new fiscal formulas which could assure high levels of access to education and reverse the stark inequalities in expenditure inherited from the apartheid years, but without putting too much pressure on the fiscus. The subsections which follow detail how this was addressed, and what was achieved.

2.4.1 New Fiscal Formulas

The fiscal solutions to this dilemma, arrived at by the new technocracy (with particular relevance to education) were two, which worked to complement each other. First, an ‘equitable shares formula’ would create a division of centrally sourced revenue and provide those shares to the provinces and local governments. The formula would consider the weight of certain needs (total population, enrolment, the size of the economy, the need for a certain fixed cost to run a province) to create shares of funding. After keeping a certain amount of funds for financing national-level activities, and a certain amount for subnational activities (the ‘vertical’ break), the central government created a ‘horizontal’ division for the provinces. From within their share, the provinces were free to allocate to various sectors with considerable freedom. Some chose to devote relatively more funding to education, others to health, and so on, as they saw their needs. This allowed the central government to be perceived as responding strongly to a pressure for equity and transparency, while promising only ‘shares’ (but fair shares) of the fiscal fortune, and thus enabling a certain degree of austerity.

In a similar manner, the norms and standards for school funding, as well as the post provisioning norms for educators, provided policy direction from the national Department of Education as to how provincial education authorities should assign resources to schools in an equal (in the case of teachers) or even pro-poor manner (in the case of non-personnel, non-capital expenditure). Schools would typically not be mandated as to how to spend the funds, and some could even procure their own inputs. Echoing the ‘equitable shares formula’, the basic idea was to mandate equity in the shares of per student spending going to schools of different levels of poverty, but not to mandate absolute amounts of per student spending. At the same time, the funding norms allowed schools to self-assess fees, under certain conditions, to keep the funding at their own level, and to meld this private funding with their public funding into a unified vision of the school’s budget under the (presumably) strong supervision of the school governing body. Both ‘formula-driven’ solutions thus focused on equity and shares, without making promises about absolute levels of expenditure. The results seem to have been pro-equity, encouraged the maintenance of an upward trend in enrolment, and did prevent a privatization of middle-class schooling.

As Figure 2.4 makes clear, funding for education remained reasonably constant as a proportion of GDP, at least over the longer haul. Thus, in that sense, the ‘trick’ of keeping the middle classes involved in public education ‘worked.’ Compared to other upper-middle income countries, South Africa spent a high proportion of GDP on education and it maintained this proportion throughout the late 1990s and onwards, as other countries caught up. The result was that by 2015 the expenditure patterns of South Africa and the comparator countries were similar to one another.

Funding for education, South Africa and comparator countries

2.4.2 Trends in Access to Education

After and before apartheid, what did the spending buy for South Africa and for other countries, in terms of access to education (enrolment)? As section 2.2 detailed, as of the end of apartheid, access to primary education was ‘raw’ (‘raw’ in the sense that though access was high, quality was highly variable, and almost always poor for low-income black South Africans).

As Figure 2.5 shows, access to secondary enrolment, already high in comparison with other UMICS, continued apace after the end of apartheid. The percentage of South Africa’s youth cohorts attending secondary education was known to be rising (though the figure makes it hard to see this precisely in the early 1990s, because South Africa was not and in any case reporting in the late 1980s showed South Africa to be nearly on par with the comparators). The rise in attendance at secondary education in the early 1990s had obviously nothing to do with any policies set in place by the democratic government, and much to do with a sort of populist expansion of investment in the Bantustans (which included also the creation of large numbers of teacher training colleges). But the approaches put in place by the democratic government allowed those trends to continue and for secondary enrolments to essentially catch up to the comparator UMICs by 2010 or so.

Access to secondary education, South Africa and comparator countries

Figure 2.6 shows both the growth in enrolment as a proportion of the more-or-less enrolable age groups and, importantly, changes in the pattern of enrolment within those age groups. 9 Given constancy in spending, South Africa showed relative constancy in both enrolment and in composition of enrolment: the end of apartheid had hardly any discernible impact. The comparator countries showed much more growth in total enrolment and that enrolment came about both because of more spending, but also because of a reorganization of enrolment between sub-sectors, with a strong relative shrinking of primary education and an expansion in other levels, achieved partly by increasing the internal efficiency of primary education. Countries in other regions, particularly in Latin America, became more and more convinced of the importance of human capital in generating growth and combatting inequality, and spending was stepped up, particularly in sub-sectors such as early childhood. (Also stepped up in South Africa, but not quite as much, and, perhaps, with not—yet—much demonstration of cognitive results.)

Composition and relative size of enrolment by level, South Africa and comparator countries

2.4.3 Equity in Resourcing

It is clear that resourcing came to be far more pro-poor after democracy. Being pro-poor correlates very closely with being pro-African, but note that the funding norms in South Africa (both in the sense of funding from centre to provinces, and from provinces to schools) were (naturally) de-racialized after democracy, and were set in terms of poverty or were poverty- and race-neutral at best (with one proviso: formerly richer schools typically kept more expensive teaching staff, even if the numbers of teaching staff publicly provided were de-racialized). Data can be tracked by province as well, and, with some assumptions, by race. But the important categories are poverty and province. Strong evidence of the fast changes in, for example, public funding, can be found in Department of Education ( 2006 : 36), and is reproduced as Table 2.1 .

Two summary measures of inequality are presented in this table: a Gini coefficient and a Coefficient of Variation (CV). Both show radical reductions in the inequality of public funding—roughly 75 per cent to 80 per cent in just fifteen years, with most of the change coming in the space of just ten years (1990 to 2000, roughly). Naturally, the provinces did not exist in 1990, but their constituent ‘homelands’ and RSA departments did, their enrolments and their per capita expenditures were known, and so it is possible to present a fairly complete and accurate picture of matters towards the end of apartheid and the progress in the years immediately after. Note that we do not necessarily know the intra-provincial spending inequality, so these numbers may overstate (or conceivably understate) progress. Spending increased faster in the provinces whose internal inequality would have been greater; on the other hand, the school funding norms were already operating and were already reducing intra-provincial inequalities, and if spending increased faster in provinces whose internal equality was improving faster, then Table 2.1 could be understating total equalization.

Table 2.1 makes it clear that the apartheid inheritance disproportionately favoured Gauteng and the Western Cape; so the rebalancing meant spreading their ‘excess’ resources to the other provinces. The Northern Cape, being very small in enrolment terms, did not contribute much in absolute terms to the re-balancing, but gives further evidence that the formula-based cutting back of the ‘bigger spenders’ worked transparently and without much favouritism. However, note also that because the poorer provinces were also among the largest, cutting back on the spending in the higher-spending ones could not result in big per pupil increases in spending in the lower-spending provinces. (Also, recall that how much to spend on education was, according to the equitable shares formula, a matter for the provinces to prioritize, so these numbers are a result both of equity drivers in the central funding, the equity drivers in the school funding norms, but also of provincial decisions on how much of their fiscal share to spend on education.)

Another take, using the actual homelands data from Buckland and Fielden ( 1994 ) and Department of Education ( 2006 ), gives the Lorenz curves shown in Figure 2.7 for inequality of public recurrent expenditure in terms of the fourteen departments that spent money on pupils in a distinguishable manner (i.e. ignoring provincial differences in HoA spending). The curves are approximate, because for the erstwhile administrative departments the curve is plotted with population by expenditure level on the horizontal axis. Nonetheless, the results are striking: the dashed black spending curve for 2004 is nearly exactly equal to the 45-degree line of equality, whereas the lower line for spending in 1991 yielded a Gini coefficient of 0.33.

Changes in inequality curves for distribution of public resourcing of public schools

Naturally, given that the system allowed schools to charge individual fees (determined at local level, and therefore much higher for the higher income groups), these numbers under-state the amount of inequality reduction achieved. Nonetheless, such a rapid reduction in inequality in public spending is unequalled in modern history, to our knowledge. Remaining inequalities, though, surely account for some important differences in performance (van der Berg and Gustafsson, 2017 ).

2.5 Curricular Trends and Learning Outcomes Implications

Among the many transformations of South Africa’s education system, the transformation of the education curriculum was perhaps the most far-reaching in terms of its implications for day-to-day practice in the classroom. This section describes this transformation, reports on the consequences (of the full set of transformations, curricular and otherwise) for learning outcomes, and also on some recent, perhaps somewhat encouraging trends.

2.5.1 Curriculum under Apartheid

Over the forty-eight years of National Party rule, syllabuses, examinations, and prescribed instructional practice changed significantly, adapting to both shifts in political economy and broader international trends in curriculum. The shifts in curriculum can be seen in the changes in the ‘imagined’ learner of different curricula across time. As outlined earlier, early mission and colonial curricula were concerned with the conversion of the ‘heathen indigene’. Industrialisation and the onset of mining focused the curriculum on the development of manual skills and docility (the ‘moral’ and ‘industrious’ learner). In the 1930s, in the light of international debates, the notion of the (indigenous) colonial subject became tied up in issues of cultural specificity and questions of the mind of the ‘native’. Here, strong culturalist notions of the learner, whose language and traditions should be preserved through education, provided the platform for Bantu education and the apartheid ideology of separate development. With the modernization of the economy, higher skills were sought and the curriculum focus became increasingly vocational. In the later 1980s and early 1990s the imagined learner of the curriculum became something quite different—the individual learner of no determinate race on the one hand, and a worker for a growing and diversifying economy on the other. These last reform attempts of the apartheid government, came, however, late in the day and given the intensified political protest and breakdown of teaching and learning in schools, reached only the minority white sectors of schooling.

Despite these shifts, a number of general points can be made about curriculum, especially from the mid-1950s onwards. Firstly, different knowledge was distributed to different race groups, accomplished less through different syllabuses and more through segregated provision, and differences in the material and symbolic resources available to different race groups in different schools. The fact that the curriculum was very similar on paper was used to mask inequities. The Minister of Bantu Education in the late 1970s proudly claimed that his department ‘had not only adopted the same curricula and syllabi as were used by Whites, but Black and White students were now writing the same senior certificate and matriculation exams’ (Marcum, 1982: 21, cited in Jansen, 1990 : 202). Black students, however, received watered-down, minimal or narrower curricula than children in the white department of education. There were different subjects on offer in white and black schools, more academic in white schools, and more vocationally oriented in black schools. The distribution of teachers capable of teaching more demanding subjects was also quite different. Secondly, the issue of language was paramount and would become the flashpoint for intense protest in the 1970s. The language issues are complex, and shifted over time, but crucially had to do with the imposition of Afrikaans on African language speaking learners as the language of instruction and testing. Language was also used, especially in the primary school, as a means for establishing the cultural particularity and apartness of black learners; while white, Indian, and coloured children had to learn two languages, African children had to learn three (for long periods, as early as the third grade). Third, curricula contained racial biases favouring whites, and the stereotyping of the black population as tribal, rural and backward. Ideological content was added to the syllabuses specifically for black learners presenting a narrow (largely rural) and static view of ‘Bantu society’, and referencing some folk and historical heroes as well as contemporary apartheid arrangements and governing institutions for the black population. Fourth, and throughout the period, curricula constructed during apartheid were subject-based and content-driven, with minimal explicit conceptual content-skill relationships made. Knowledge across curriculum reforms was regarded as ‘given’ and strong boundaries were maintained between different subjects.

Among South Africa’s education sector pedagogical thought leaders, there was an enduring progressivist thrust in curriculum, both inside and outside of the state, sustained through the decades up until the transition to democracy in 1994. To be sure, official attempts at curriculum innovation in the 1970s and 1980s were largely piecemeal—often consisting of taking out contents or adding in new contents in different subjects. But there also were ongoing micro-reforms, often influenced by trends in the United States and United Kingdom, notably ideas arising out of progressive reforms there. Galant ( 1997 ) gives the example that, between 1974 and 1984, at least five new syllabuses were introduced in South Africa following the ‘new maths’ movement in Europe. However, these largely had effect in white schools only. There was also a significant amount of curriculum work being done outside of state institutions, as alternatives to the traditional curriculum forms developed during the apartheid era.

2.5.2 A Radical Curriculum for Democracy

The first post-apartheid curriculum, Curriculum 2005 (C2005), introduced in 1998, was a radical constructivist curriculum that emphasised a learner-centred, outcomes-based approach to teaching and learning. It backgrounded prescribed knowledge content, leaving it to teachers and learners to select the appropriate content or precise method in order to achieve specified outcomes. Textbooks and testing were regarded as authoritarian and backward-looking, and were dispensed with (apart from the Grade 12 examination). C2005 was framed as a ‘radical break’ from the apartheid past. It was essentially a reform focused on pedagogy—intent on shifting authoritarian relations of classrooms, defined by bureaucratic routine, deferential ritual and whole class, choral production of knowledge at a very low level of cognitive complexity. In the process of addressing issues of pedagogy, knowledge and its specification was lost.

What is often missed in the accounts of the shift from apartheid to C2005 is that although the changes introduced represented a radical departure from the past for black schools, for white schools (which had been part of the final progressive curriculum reforms of the apartheid era) there was much continuity between the new curriculum and established pedagogic practices (Harley and Wedekind, 2004). Thus, the schools where teachers were in the first place less qualified, were also the schools who were most disadvantaged by the very unfamiliar terms of the new curriculum.

2.5.3 Reforming the Reform

The new curriculum, C2005, quickly came under severe criticism. What became clear in its implementation was its complexity, incomprehensible to many, and inappropriate for the majority of classroom contexts (Jansen and Christie, 1999 ). The system was unprepared for the shift to a radical, learner-centred, outcomes-based curriculum—introduced in a very short space of time, with very little training. A review of the curriculum followed in 2000, presenting the central critique of C2005 as barring access to school knowledge for both learners and teachers. The fact that the curriculum had removed most of subject content, and replaced it with outcomes expressed as generic skills, meant that teachers were expected to select the appropriate content and design ‘learning programmes’ themselves. Teachers in more advantaged schools were confident, well advised, and could rely on past experience and training in selecting content from their field of specialisation to construct appropriate learning programmes for students. However, in the majority of schools, poor prior training, and a lack of school-level support made this impossible. Pedagogic practices of the past, entailing the communal production of low level, localised content, persisted. The central difference was that learners sat in groups—group work becoming for many teachers a graspable outward form of the curriculum they could implement, masking real change in the classroom.

The 2000 review introduced a second iteration of this curriculum, the National Curriculum Statement. It retained the outcomes-based framework, but delineated more clearly content knowledge and appropriate methodologies for teaching. It also attempted to reassert the importance of summative assessment (tests and examinations). The retention of outcomes, however, would prove politically contentious and pedagogically problematic. Under increasing pressure of poor student academic outcomes and stringent public criticism of the outcomes-based education framework, a further review was initiated in 2009; in 2012 the current curriculum, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) was implemented. In this curriculum, outcomes-based education was abandoned in favour of clear, per grade content stipulation, as well as specified pacing and sequencing requirements for the curriculum. The importance of textbooks as key pedagogical resources for both students and teachers was reasserted. A programme of distributing curriculum-aligned workbooks to all learners was entrenched. CAPS thus established a clear and stable curriculum-based signalling system for teacher training, the development of textbooks, and accountability for classroom practice. The highly specified curriculum would also lay an important basis for experimentation in instructional reform, discussed below.

Teacher training did not receive the same levels of attention as curriculum reform—and was complicated by the under-stipulated nature of C2005. Thus, teachers schooled and trained through Bantu education under apartheid lacked opportunity to overcome the legacy of a very poor preparation for teaching. Without teachers gaining a better content understanding of subjects to be taught, not simply new and complex ways in which to teach them, there was unlikely to be significant change in classroom practices and learning outcomes. Although more recently there has been some shift in instructional practices (Hoadley, 2018 ), especially in the number of texts in classrooms, many of the practices dominant under apartheid, the communalized, slow pace of learning and low level of classroom content, persist in the majority of classrooms (Hoadley, 2012 ). The clear specification in the CAPS of what content is to be covered when and in what order has promise to shift these practices both directly in classrooms and through defining subject-specific teacher training requirements more precisely.

2.5.4 Cognitive Achievement after the Transformation

This is a complicated story, and much depends on what countries one compares South Africa with, and on what issues. One can start with the most commonly held and alarming part of the story: that South Africa, in comparison with the world as a whole, or at least in comparison with the parts of the world that participate in assessments such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or Progress on International Literacy Study (PIRLS) (repeated approximately every three years since 1995), performs badly, in absolute terms (last or nearly last—but noting that most countries that participate in these assessments are wealthy countries with long-established education systems), but also, perhaps more alarmingly, relative to its level of per capita income and the level of fiscal effort devoted to education. In exercises predicting results in TIMSS Grade 4 Mathematics for 2015, and PIRLS 2016, using GDP per capita and public spending on education as a share of GDP as predictors, for instance, South Africa’s actual performance is much worse than expected—in fact, South Africa is perhaps one of the ‘worst’ outliers. Figure 2.8 shows predicted performance on the horizontal axis and actual performance on the vertical axis. South Africa is clearly a negative outlier—and this is at least fifteen years after the end of apartheid, when the system has had at least ten years to ‘practice’ with improving lives for the children who take this assessment.

South Africa as an efficiency outlier in TIMSS and PIRLS

In the case of SACMEQ III (2007) data, South Africa appears not so much as an under-performing outlier. Part of the reason for this is that in making comparisons in SACMEQ, the total score achieved by students is affected by the degree to which the country has a high primary school completion rate: countries with a higher completion rate are making a bigger ‘access effort’ in reaching out to previously un-served portions of their populations, and are thus trying to educate those who are harder to educate (e.g. may be first-generation literates in their families). Once this is corrected for, 10 what is interesting is not so much that South Africa is a negative outlier (as is the case in TIMSS 2015 and PIRLS 2016) but that (as Figure 2.9 shows) there seem to be positive outliers, namely Kenya, from which South Africa could perhaps be learning (but generally has not been, or had not been until recently). Chapter 10 explores this issue further.

Kenya as positive outlier in SACMEQ

Almost any way one looks at it, the internal distribution (the cognitive equality) of South Africa’s scores is quite poor, at least in comparison with other countries taking part in assessments such as TIMSS, PIRLS, and SACMEQ. However, using various rounds of TIMSS, inequality has decreased, even markedly if one believes the data. Taking the score produced by children at the ninety-fifth percentile of the score distribution, subtracting the score produced by children at the fifth percentile, and dividing the result by the score produced by children at the middle of the distribution is a reasonable measure of relative inequality. Typically, developing countries with low averages will tend to show higher relative inequality (because the denominator is low). Wealthier, more educationally developed countries will tend to show less inequality, both because they actually apply more effort to improve things at the bottom of their distributions, and because their averages are higher.

Table 2.2 shows some examples, and shows South Africa’s placement both at a given point in time and over time. The data are sorted from the most equal country in 2003 to some of the most unequal in 2003, 2011, and 2015. It is clear that South Africa is among the most unequal, though there are sometimes one or two that are just a bit more unequal. Table 2.3 shows the data for PIRLS 2016, showing that South Africa, has, if not quite the worst inequality results (using our index), close to it. Some developing countries which have done more work on improving equality are shown. Chile, for instance, in 2016, has nearly 40 per cent less inequality as South Africa does in PIRLS 2016. (But note only about 25 per cent less in TIMSS 2015 Grade 4 Mathematics.)

The inequality in South Africa looms particularly large also in comparison with other countries in the SACMEQ region. Figure 2.10 shows each country’s average reading and mathematics scores in 2007 (SACMEQ III) in the bars. Differences, in each country, between the performance of high and low SES students are shown as lines. One line (solid) shows the absolute difference, that is the difference in points scored, between the high-SES and the low-SES students. Another line (dotted) shows the difference divided by the average score: a more thorough indicator of inequality, if perhaps a slightly harder one to understand. 11 Countries are shown ranked from left to right in order of overall performance. This helps make it clear, comparing the size of the bars and the slope of the lines, that in general (in the case of SACMEQ—no such assertion can be made for other cross-country assessments) there is an association between increasing average scores and increasing inequality. South Africa is seen to be of middling performance in terms of the total score. But the most striking thing is that in spite of South Africa’s average performance being only middling, its inequality as measured using either of the measures noted, was distinctly the highest, especially taking the relative (dotted) measure into account. 12

South Africa as an inequality outlier, SACMEQ data

2.5.5 Recent Upticks in Performance

The low results for South Africa, especially when one controls for fiscal effort made in favour of education and for GDP per capita, and also the inequality in the results distribution, have been alarming, especially as they are evident ten to fifteen years after the changes that would supposedly benefit the children were crafted. Some, as noted above, foresaw likely low impact from early on. However, more recently there have been some signs of hope. First, as van der Berg and Gustafsson ( 2017 ) have shown, recent levels of improvement of South Africa in TIMSS are quite fast, comparable to Brazil’s improvements on PISA—themselves quite fast. Table 2.2 shows that, at the fiftieth percentile (the median), South Africa’s TIMSS performance between 2011 and 2015 improved by about twenty points. Van der Berg and Gustafsson ( 2017 ) explain that Brazil’s improvement in PISA, of about 0.06 of a standard deviation per year, is at about the upper limit of how quickly countries can improve, and that South Africa’s improvement is on a par with Brazil’s. Whether these trends will continue, and how truly solid they ultimately are (they seem to be) would be hard to say. But for now they seem to bode well. The same authors show improved results in the equity of matric results in more or less the same period (roughly 2008 to 2015). And this lines up well with the evidence on the reduced inequality in TIMSS results presented in Table 2.2 .

At the same time, at the pilot project level, it seems as if fast improvements are possible and are documented, even in underprivileged schools, via what Fleisch ( n.d. ), and Fleisch ( 2016 ) calls a ‘turn to the instructional core’ and sometimes the ‘triple cocktail’ of simplified curricular lesson plans, vastly improved and intensified coaching of teachers, instructional and curricular materials that (perhaps for the first time) are aligned a) with the lesson plans and with vastly improved and increased coaching and b) are available in the home language of the learners. 13 A description of the components of these early grades reading projects is to be found at Department of Basic Education ( 2017 ). To some extent, these efforts represent the most serious attempt, perhaps since the end of apartheid, to reverse the litany of cogent critiques of classroom instruction presented by Hoadley ( 2012 ) and are documented perhaps most succinctly and accessibly in Spaull and Hoadley ( 2017 ). 14 Even earlier, however, critics of C2005 had experimented with methods of direct instruction that seemed to work well, at least at imparting basic concepts (Schollar, 2015 ).

Now, one might over-read into these glimmers of hope, because of the usual ‘external validity’ problem of pilot projects and randomized controlled trials. However, there is a lot of evidence from other countries that the basic ‘formula’, elsewhere referred to as ‘structured pedagogy’, (Snilstveit et al., 2015) used in these particular efforts in South Africa, does work in general, and are thus less of a concern over what one might call pedagogical or cultural external validity. 15 This is part of a broader worldwide trend towards ‘teaching at the right level’ while eschewing the damage created by curricula and teaching and lesson approaches that are theoretically ambitious but very badly implemented in practice. 16 While strong evidence would suggest that these programs do not suffer from much of a pedagogical or cultural external validity problem, they could suffer from the usual ‘exhaustion when taken to scale by government problem’, whereby, when a programme is implemented by government, the necessary fidelity which can be guaranteed by good governance and accountability is lost, as has been documented in other cases (see Bold et al., 2013 ).

But serious concerns remain. The glimmers of hope noted above seem real enough. But they are either not big, or if big, not sustained (yet) over any serious length of time. Or, the changes refer only to pilot projects, sometimes without rigorous randomized controls (though sometimes with). South Africa’s educational outcomes are so far behind other middle-income countries, as noted above, that stronger remedies seem necessary, and most commentators on the scene do not see them. Either the lists of remedies scholars provide are very long, or the remedies would seem to require using up quite a bit of political capital. The pedagogical dysfunctionalities observed in the classroom and reported by Hoadley ( 2012 ) are many and profound. Nick Taylor, writing for DPME/Department of Basic Education ( 2017 ), notes that time management in schools remains poor, teacher content knowledge is way below what is needed to sustain instruction, formative assessment is weak, and teaching and learning materials are not always present. He lays particular blame on corruption, nepotism, and usage of union power to select often inappropriate teachers—in essence, governance and management problems.

2.6 Tentative Conclusions

To speak of the results of the transformation as if they could be causally traced to the transformation would be mistaken. Policy changes as massive as those wrought in South Africa are hardly controlled experiments; any mention of causality therefore should be seen with suspicion. We occasionally lapse into language that seems to assign causality because it is inelegant to be qualifying constantly. But the proviso holds throughout.

The thesis of this section, and hence of the whole chapter, could be put something like this:

Governance was reformed and unified in ways which were responsive to both the imperatives of South Africa’s broader political settlement, and to normative conceptions of ‘good practice’ which prevailed at the time, both globally and within South Africa.

The government succeeded in transferring resources in a sharp manner. Perhaps not as much as would have been desired by progressive educationists, but to an extent that is unprecedentedly large relative to the international experience and, strikingly, was achieved within a framework of severe macroeconomic constraint.

The curriculum was reformed and unified so as to do away with odious apartheid implications and at the same time to ‘modernize’ it according to the dominant global and national perceptions of the day, recognizing that even under apartheid certain ‘modernizing’ reforms had already started.

Yet, at least by the middle 2000s, or approximately ten years after the formal end of apartheid and the start of the transformations, there seemed not to be much to show for the effort, particularly viewed from the twin lenses of efficiency and equity. Numbers (‘access’) had increased a little (in some sub-sectors a lot). But learning outcomes, and their inequality, in particular, seemed largely stuck, in spite of some glimmers of hope.

The general view continues to be that the overall effort has been a failure. Indeed, almost immediately upon the announcement of the reforms, especially the curricular reforms, critics such as Jansen ( 2001 ) had noted these reforms could not possibly work, or at least not to the extent of the hopes pinned upon them.

The conclusion might be that the better-off segments of the system, at the outset of the transformations, were able to weather the changes in funding, either by self-funding or by becoming more efficient. It is also possible to conclude that they were able to either tune out some of the least useful of the curricular reforms, had already adapted them (given that some of the curricular reforms pre-dated the end of apartheid), or were able to adapt them in light of what they saw as more sensible, given that these segments of the sector had much better-trained teachers, and given that the governance of these schools trusted (and had good reasons to trust) the professionalism of the teachers (and principals). These segments of the system were those where ‘good governance’ (defined elsewhere in this book) was common.

In other segments of the system, however, neither teachers nor other officials within the education bureaucracy had the training, background, and incentives to put in the hard effort it would have taken to interpret the new curricular and teaching/learning dispensations in a manner that made sense to them and for their environment. Nor, of course, notwithstanding the enhanced role afforded them vis-à-vis school-level governance, were parents in a position to provide support for implementation of the new approaches. Schools on the whole seem unable to make much use of the extra non-personnel funding allocated via the Funding Norms. Informality and maybe even corruption seem to be playing a role in preventing good management.

But things continue to evolve. Some pilot research has shown that, at least in the lower grades, there are sensible ways to simplify and structure the curriculum so that children learn better. These simplified approaches are also easier, in principle, for parents to supervise and in that sense might fit better with a governance model that provides School Governing Bodies considerable power—though the whole notion of the sorts of stable, idealized ‘parenthood’ envisioned in the South African Schools Act might be problematic in the South African context. In that sense, presuming that additional study and evidence confirms the seemingly compelling evidence from pilot projects, curricular simplification or, at any rate, clearer specification of lesson plans and more direct teaching (along with delivery of more and better learning materials and capacity building for teachers) could be nicely made to coincide with a revamped role for localized parental accountability, if governance could be improved along the lines explored in later chapters of this book.

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The figure uses both a formally estimated semi-logarithmic fit of results (the ‘survival’ rate to Standard 5) on the vertical axis and inputs (cost per student) on the horizontal axis, as well as a casually estimated ‘envelope’ or ‘near envelope’ of the data.

For reasons explained below, we prefer to assure the integrity of international comparisons by using one standardized international database, in this case the World Bank’s, which derives from data reported by countries to UNESCO. If one debates the SA data, then in principle one could similarly debate the data for every single country, and these kinds of comparisons would become either impossible or very tedious to read. The point of using a large number of comparators is to support fairly general statements such as those we make here.

See n. 7 for a discussion of the comparator countries.

A Google search for ‘World Bank interest in education decentralization’, for instance, produces, at the top of its search results, five documents, all produced between 1996 and 1998, some by prominent and influential thinkers such as Mark Bray, Edward Fiske, and Harry Patrinos (Bray, 1996 ; Fiske, 1996 ; Patrinos and Ariasingam, 1997 ).

See, for example, Mandela (2004), Sparks (1996), Marais (1998), Seekings and Nattrass (2005), Gevisser (2007), and Welsh (2009).

In South Africa, public education dominates, both historically and to the present day; as of 2016, about 95% of school-going children were enrolled in the public system. See https://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Reports/School%20Realities%202016%20Final.pdf?ver=2016-11-30-111439-223 , p. 3.

For this section, we constructed a set of comparator countries consisting of countries that were a) upper-middle income in the period 1990–95, according to the World Bank’s classification for that period, b) were ‘big enough to have complexity and interest’ (our judgement—examples include Antigua and Barbuda, Malta, etc.), and c) not oil-rich (Gabon, Saudi Arabia, etc.). The resulting comparator countries were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, Slovenia, South Africa, and Uruguay. As is often the case in using international databases, not all countries have data for all variables in all years, so the medians for the comparators have to be interpreted with caution: only for the overall sense of direction. Note that in principle, it would have been possible to use South African data for the South African case, but we opted to use World Bank data for all countries, as this would provide a standardized set where data would, hopefully, be maximally comparable to each other.

For instance, Andrew Donaldson (1992), who would become a prominent actor in the Ministry of Finance, was already noting in the early 1990s that the education system in South Africa was notoriously inefficient: ‘“Internal efficiency” is of course not the only aspect of the economic efficiency of the education system, but it is all too easily neglected…And in South Africa, improved educational opportunities must be afforded to some 10m children…although available financial resources are stretched more or less to their limits. In these circumstances, improving the “internal efficiency” of the education system is the only way forward…I take the view that there is scope for improvements in the way schooling and training are organized and provided in South Africa, that this is an arena in which the post-apartheid state can meet substantially the rising expectations of the new electorate, and that reorganising the education industry will lay an important foundation for sustainable long-term economic growth’.

The age groups in question are three to twenty-four, to take into account pre-primary and even pre-Grade 0 pre-primary all the way up to tertiary.

Using SACMEQ data we have corrected for ‘access effort’ by creating a simple index of human capital contemporaneously produced by the country, by taking the SACMEQ score (averaging reading and mathematics) times the primary school completion rate (divided by 100, to keep the numbers in the same range as the scores). This score is then controlled by the speed with which the completion rate has been improved (increasing the completion quickly would presumably drain resources away from improving learning outcomes), the fiscal effort the country devotes to education (education expenditure as a share of GDP), and GDP per capita.

Note that the scores and the absolute differences between the low and high SES levels are shown as bars on the left-hand vertical scale, whereas the relative differences (high minus low divided by the mean) are shown as lines, on the right-hand vertical scale.

Inequality also happens to have increased between 2000 and 2007, though this is not shown in the graphic. Inequality seems to have increased in all countries, but it increased most for South Africa.

See https://internationalednews.com/2015/06/10/brahm-fleisch-on-building-a-new-infrastructure-for-learning-in-gauteng-south-africa/ . Also see Spaull’s weblog on the ideas behind Early Grade Reading projects in South Africa, at https://nicspaull.com/ .

It is important to note that the ineffective techniques noted by these various authors, which the pilot projects are reversing, are not necessarily ‘due’ to post-apartheid curricular reforms. These practices have been endured by poor South African children for many decades; but the confused idealism of the post-apartheid curricular reforms did nothing to improve on the situation or, in some cases, could have made it worse. This would be especially the case where parents are not able to understand the nature of the transformations and are under-equipped to hold teachers accountable for ineffective practices, teachers found the new practices bewildering, and districts were unable to help.

See literature such as Piper and Korda ( 2010 ) from Liberia and Freudenberger and Davis ( 2017 ) from Kenya. Kelly and Graham ( 2017 ) mention many other country cases. Patrinos describes the Papua New Guinea case ( https://hpatrinos.com/tag/papua-new-guinea-education-early-grade-reading/ ).

Banerjee et al. ( 2016 ) and Pritchett and Beatty ( 2012 ) discuss the global experience.

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Home / Essay Samples / Education / History of Education / History Of Education In South Africa

History Of Education In South Africa

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Topic: History of Education

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Introduction

The christian national education committee, the change in british government, the establishment of the union of south africa, the differentiation of education, the sowe to uprising.

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Essay: South African Education Systems

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2 The Transformation of South Africa’s System of Basic Education

2.1 Introduction

2.2 South Africa’s Education Sector—A Legacy of Dualism

2.2.1 Some Deep Background

2.2.2 Fast-Forward 300 Years

2.2.3 Educational Inputs and Outcomes at the Dawn of Democracy

2.3 Transforming Education Sector Governance

2.4 Transforming Education Financing

2.4.1 New Fiscal Formulas

2.4.2 Trends in Access to Education

2.4.3 Equity in Resourcing

2.5 Curricular Trends and Learning Outcomes Implications

2.5.1 Curriculum under Apartheid

2.5.2 A Radical Curriculum for Democracy

2.5.3 Reforming the Reform

2.5.4 Cognitive Achievement after the Transformation

2.5.5 Recent Upticks in Performance

2.6 Tentative Conclusions

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History Of Education In South Africa

Introduction

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