The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948-1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened

Abstract

The History of under Apartheid, 1948-1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened. Edited by Peter Kallaway. History of Schools and Schooling, Vol. 28. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Pp. xvi, 399. 10 illustrations. $34.95 paper. Though about the history of during South Africa's apartheid era, this book is very much concerned with the development of educational policy under the country's democratically elected government since 1994. Furthermore, it is largely the product of South African scholars, starting with the editor, Peter Kallaway, who is professor of at the University of the Western Cape. Of the twenty-six contributors, twenty-one are based in South Africa, one in Great Britain, and four (two of whom are South Africans) in the United States. Of those in South Africa, five are with the government's Human Sciences Research Council and four others are with university educational policy units or otherwise at the university level working on policy issues. Others are involved with adult education, teacher education, and worker education, while three have a sociology background and six are historians and/or historians of education. Their starting point is with the direction of change in since 1994, much of which is rooted in the apartheid system of education. As a result, anti-apartheid activists are disturbed about some of the they are now observing. As Kallaway writes in his introduction, This collection is, in part, directed to the promotion of on the nature of those changes (p. 5). The careful reflection that Kallaway and the other authors seek to promote needs the context that the history of provides. Only through answering key questions about the nature of apartheid and the opposition to it over time (p. 6) can we properly understand to what degree has the old system influenced educational policy since 1994. And, beyond this, there is the question of the continuities and between the Bantu Education of the apartheid era and the colonial system of native education that preceded it. In short, in terms of African education, how significant were both 1948 and 1994 in terms of the schooling available to Africans? Consequently, this collection of essays calls into question many of the long-standing preconceptions about Africans and their schools under apartheid. The book is divided into four parts: (I) Shifts and Continuities in South African after 1948; (II) Apartheid Education, Popular Resistance, and Alternative Education; (III) Biographies/Autobiographies and Life Stories; and (IV) Identities and Institutions. …

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