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Subject: search.filters.subject.Blacks. Education. South Africa

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    Segregation, science and commissions of enquiry: The contestation of native education policy in South Africa 1930-36
    (1996-04-29) Krige, Sue
    This paper focuses on debates around African education which emerged from two State initiated commissions and an education conference in the period 193 0-193 6: the 1932 Natives Economic Commission (NEC), the 1935-6 Interdepartmental Committee into Native Education (Welsh Committee) and the New Education Fellowship (NEF) Conference of 1934. The paper highlights the responses of the English-speaking Protestant missions to two major and intermeshing trends which affected African education during this period, secularisation and segregation. In the history of South African education, a clear but neglected theme which emerges in the period after the First World War is the desire of the mission churches to resist State control, and to retain control of their schools in terms of administration, appointment of staff and curriculum content. Implicit in the struggle over control of African education were important issues such as the location and nature of expertise, what constitutes worthwhile knowledge, the most appropriate schooling system for imparting knowledge and the political consequences of such policy. Through the lens of debates around African education, global and colonial trends such as the rise of science, the secularisation of knowledge and the concomitant emergence of the "expert" can be seen. This paper argues that church responses to these trends incorporated more than merely an outdated reliance on nineteenth century Cape liberalism and notions of assimilation. They drew on an emerging critique of segregation and the illiberal use of science and expertise which emerged both from South Africa and from the British colonial experience elsewhere in Africa.
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    A destruction coming in: Bantu education as response to social crisis
    (1989-09) Hyslop, Jonathan
    The imposition of Bantu Education in the 1950s has often been portrayed as the destructive action of a Nationalist government intent, for purely ideological reasons, on uprooting a successful and largely benevolent mission education system: in this view the missions were, as Edgar Brookes put it, “butchered to make an ideologist's holiday”. (1) But this approach to the issue fails to grasp the essential basis of educational restructuring in the 1950s. The educational policies of the state during this decade were above all an attempt to respond to the crisis of reproduction of the labour force, and especially its urban component, which had developed during the previous decade. I will suggest in this article that the state was particularly concerned to provide the necessary conditions of reproduction for that section of the labour force which was permanently urbanized and reliant upon a wage. As the urban population grew, social reproductive mechanisms which had operated in the 1920s and 1930s began to break down. In the 1940s the combined forces of collapsing homeland agriculture and expanding secondary industrialization, generated rapid urbanization. This placed the existing provision for urban social reproduction under enormous strain. Housing, transport, and wages were all inadequate to meet the needs of the growing urbanized working class. Squatter movements, bus boycotts and trade unionism spread rapidly, as popular initiatives which contested these arenas. In turn these fueled the emergence of a higher and more radical level of oppositional political activity, marked by the emergence of the Mandela - Tambo - Sobukwe generation of leadership in the ANC. Thus the dominant classes were faced on the one hand with levels of poverty which threatened the very physical production of their workforce, and on the other by new political threats. The National Party's policies of the 1950s were largely addressed to resolving this urban reproductive crisis.