Pintura

Schooling as a formal concept was introduced to South Africa by English migrant settlers during the 18^th century. Prior to the arrival of the English, the Dutch hardly provided any form of formal schooling until the 18^th century with some church-based elementary schools run by itinerant teachers. 2 schools for children of slaves were also established (Johnson, 1982). This era precedes the formation of unitary state and therefore has no direct bearing upon the critique of the history of state powers imposed upon education.

The first formation of a state in the form of a colony under the British empire followed. The British saw schooling as a means of promoting their policy of “Anglicisation of the Boers” when they arrived in 1806 and a formal system of education was established. British, Christian

missionaries were prepared to serve their faith in the role of teachers and through them, the system of schooling education was provided to black African people in South Africa for the first time. In 1812 the British established a system of free schooling and in 1866, the language of English was made compulsory in 1^st and 2^nd Class schools in the Cape. The Cape Education Act, No. 13 of 1865, legislated that 1^st Class schools were schools located in “chief towns” and 2^nd Class schools were located in “lesser towns”. The funding allocated to 1^st and 2^nd Class schools ensured the teaching of a wide range of subjects with compulsory English language instruction.

3^rd Class schools were located in rural locations, received less funding, taught fewer subjects and did not encompass compulsory English language. The Boers, located in the rural areas, saw this as a move to keep them (The Boers) from advancing socially and economically, relative to new settlers arriving from Europe and they resisted by rallying around the 3^rd Class schools to preserve their language (Johnson, 1982). Education had therefore evolved to be one of the instruments or structures through which the colonised state exercised its power. As the state was neither a traditional state nor a nation-state or even a unitary state, Foucault's view of a state-effect (Dean², 1994) rather than any specific form of state is more apt for understanding the historical exercise of power over what was a colonised territory at the time.

In 1853, the British embarked on a policy of “civilising rather than fighting” the indigenous peoples and supplied state support to missionaries to provide schooling to the poorer classes. By

1891, about a third of the white children in the Cape were educated in missionary schools which were completely racially mixed (white, coloured slave children and indigenous black children) (Johnson, 1982).

However, the discoveries of gold and diamonds in the Boer colonies resulted in the bitter Anglo-Boer war (1889 to 1902) and the strong rise in Afrikaner Nationalism (Oakes, 1988). Prior to the war, the education landscape was altered because the Afrikaners and poor white people saw themselves in competition with black people for economic and social opportunities. The British withdrew their support for black education and a policy of segregated education was instituted, undoing the progress of the previous 50 years. This policy of segregated educational funding lasted until the 1980's (Johnson, 1982).

The first unitary state in South Africa was established with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 as a self-governing colonial state following the Anglo-Boer wars (Oakes, 1988).

This unitary state could by no means be considered to be a nation state as it encompassed

peoples who were ethnically and culturally diverse in many ways. The colonial authority, Britain, imposed its rule of law on this diverse society and the state supported Britain in 2 subsequent wars.

With their ascent to political power in 1948 in the aftermath of the Second World War (1939 to 1945), the Afrikaner Nationalist government instituted the policy of Apartheid for the upliftment of the Afrikaner people and the system of Apartheid Education resulted in 1951 (Christie &

Collins, 1982). Their education system was referred to as Christian National Education which served to manipulate society to fit their own peculiar interpretation of Christianity – which in many respects contradicted the tenants of the Christian faith which espouses neighbourly love as one of its two foundational laws (Mark 12: 30-31, Matthew 22: 39 and Leviticus 19: 18). It was characterised by a centralised, authoritarian system, rote-learning, and an unquestioning

allegiance to nationalist and Calvinistic ideologies, as expressed by the White minority National Party government (Nel & Binns, 1999). It was designed to break the influence of English-speaking missionaries who controlled and owned the Black schools and subscribed to an

integrationist view of society with equal opportunity in education (Christie & Collins, 1982). The English speaking schools managed to resist the Apartheid education doctrine through the control of some of the provincial departments of education but with the passing of the National

Education Policy Act in 1967, the control of education policy was centralised and imposed upon all state schools. The policy of segregation was completed when dual medium (English and Afrikaans) schools were done away with on top of the racial segregation (Johnson, 1982).

Apartheid education for Black children acquired the additional stigma of being so-called ‘Bantu (or Black) education’. It was by design an inferior system, compared with that for White

children, and was one geared to producing a labour class at a low cost to the state. The system was also effective in the suppression of what had been a very significant system of missionary and church education for Blacks, because of their ideological conflict with the state. Average class sizes, which were up to three times greater for Blacks than Whites, and large funding disparities between different racial groups were retained. One of the results of these inequalities was gross differences in the marks attained by students in their final school-leaving certificates.

Pass rates of less than 50 per cent were common in Black schools, compared with pass rates frequently in excess of 90 per cent in White schools (Nel & Binns, 1999), (Kallaway, 2002).

When democracy dawned on South Africa for the first time in April 1994, the objectives for transforming education in a democratic state could reasonably have been defined in terms of the problems inflicted by the system of Apartheid. In an undemocratic system, the individuals in society were not equal before the law under the Apartheid system as different laws were applicable to different members of society according to their race. Although the subject of Apartheid education has been given scant attention by historians and educators (Kallaway, 2002), the effects of the system are referred to generally in almost every article on South African education. The state of education for the black majority was described succinctly by Dean (2000) as follows;

“ - - - -

 an inadequate teacher education system, particularly in black colleges of education

 the structural legacy of Apartheid divisions : eighteen separate, racially-defined education departments

 black children in classes often as large as 100

 disaffected and under-qualified black teachers

 a rigidly-defined, politically-driven history curriculum prescribed by whites for blacks, used as an element of control and as a rationale for the racist model of Apartheid

 no culture of problem-solving, free enquiry or active learning: the prevailing model, fundamental pedagogics, was technicist, rigid, authoritarian and conservative. Apartheid education for blacks had successfully suppressed teachers’ and pupils’ intellectual and analytical abilities (Walker, 1990)

 the destructive influence on schools of the power struggle (between civil society and the state)

 chronic underfunding of black schools

All of these problems were bequeathed by the divisive, unequal and fragmented education system that for half a century prior to 1994, had failed to adequately educate the majority of the country’s people. There was a high drop out rate among black school children linked to

widespread poverty and social alienation, coupled with a lack of provision for over one million children” (Dean, 2000).

It is evident from the aforementioned that South Africa, through successive regimes of

government, had developed a tradition of undemocratic political interference in education as a method of social engineering to meet the narrow objectives of undemocratic, political ideologies.