Africana Library
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Item Some aspects of education in South Africa(1968-12) Tunmer, Raymond; Muir, R. KSince the time of Athens and Sparta, it has been argued that the future of any state depends very much on the amount of interest and energy that is devoted to education in the state. It is now realised that finance must also be added to this list. Despite the fact that this realisation has a long history, there are few educationists in any country in the world who are satisfied with the amounts of interest, energy and finance which are devoted to education. South Africa is no exception. In this series of papers, stress will be laid on education for Non-White peoples for two reasons. The first is that less is known about their problems. The second is that if South Africa is to continue to prosper, much will depend upon the products of the country's Non-White schools. The aim in this introductory paper will be to show how great this dependence is already, and how it is likely to increase in the future. Material will be taken from a recently published report on "Education and the South African Economy", (1) as this brings together in one volume much new material. The central theme of this report can be expressed in this way: "Over the past thirty-five years the rate of economic growth in South Africa has been remarkably steady, apart from normal cyclical fluctuations, at an average of 4 1/2 per cent per annum, after allowing for the falling purchasing power of money". (2)Item A destruction coming in: Bantu education as response to social crisis(1989-09) Hyslop, JonathanThe 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.