Aftermath of Apartheid in South African Education

"If a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you . . . rejoice, for your soul is alive." -  Eleonora Duse

AFTERMATH OF APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICAN EDUCATION

At the 2003 World Forum in Acapulco, Mexico, Patsy Pillay, the Vice Chair of the South African Congress in Early Childhood Education addressed some of the challenges in upgrading early childhood education in South Africa.  One of the hurdles she described was the result of over four decades of discrimination, inequality and exclusion in the African educational system under apartheid.  According to Pillay:

"Christian National Education was imposed in South Africa in the mid-1940's.  It was an education system consistent with the social reality of an exclusionary right to knowledge.  It was therefore the foundation on which the apartheid system was established. . .The sentiments [below] shaped the education system for the next forty years:

"'When I have control of National Education I will reform it in that the Natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them. . .people who believe in equality are not desirable teachers for Natives. . .When my department controls Native education it will know for what class higher education a Native is fitted, and whether he will have a chance in life to use his knowledge. . .What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when he cannot use it in practice?  This is quite absurd.' -- Speech by Dr. Vervoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, 1954."

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