A New History of Formal Schooling South Africa: 1658 to 1910

Crain Soudien, Charlotte Fischer, Michael Cross and Peter Kallaway

HSRC Press

Product Information

Categories:

Education and skills development, History, History, humanities and liberation, Open Access, South Africa

Format:

240 x 168mm

Pages:

312pp

ISBN-13:

978-0-7969-2680-7

Publish Year:

August 2024

Rights:

World rights

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Introduction

1. A Palimpsest: Erasure and Inscription
2. A Troubled Start: Locating the Basis for the Introduction of Schooling
3. ‘Upwards and Onwards’? The March of Modernity into the Sub-Continent
4. Building the Formal System Of Schooling: The Cape Of Contradictions
5. Missionary Education in The Wider Region Of Southern Africa From 1795
6. British Natalia: Making White Supremacy
7. Establishing A Schooling System North of The Orange River – Boer Modernity
8. The Acceleration of Modernity: The Impact of the Mineral Revolution on Education
9. The Making of a Single South Africa and the Entrenchment of Racial Segregation in Schooling in South Africa

The book is the first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people. It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid. This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book. In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates. Thematically, the text seeks to thread through the conceits of race and class to show how, contradictorily, they take expression through conflict and struggle. In this conflict and struggle people who are not white (i.e., they do not yet have the racialised labels that apartheid brings in the middle of the 20th century) are systematically marginalised and discriminated against. They work with their discrimination, however, in generative ways by taking opportunity when it arises and exercising political agency. The book is important because it explains the roots of educational inequality. It shows how inequality is systematically installed in almost every step of the way. For a period, in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to forestall this inequality. The text shows how the British administration acceded to eugenicist influences which pushed children of colour out of what were called first-class schools into segregated missionary-run institutions.

Crain Soudien was educated in the fields of education and African Studies at the Universities of Cape Town, South Africa and the State University of New York at Buffalo. His PhD dissertation from Buffalo was on South African youth identity. He is a former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, where he remains an emeritus professor in Education and African Studies. He is also the former Chief Executive Officer of the Human Sciences Research Council. He has honorary professorial appointments at Nelson Mandela University and the Cape University of Technology. He is the President (honorary) of Cornerstone Institute. His publications in the areas of social difference, culture, education policy, comparative education, educational change, public history and popular culture include four books, one co-authored book, six edited collections and over 240 articles, reviews, reports, and book chapters. He has an A-rating in the South African research system. He is involved in a number of local, national and international social and cultural organisations, and is chairperson of the Independent Examinations Board, a founder and former chairperson of the District Six Museum Foundation, a former president of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies, and has served as the chair of three Ministerial Committees of Inquiry, including the Ministerial Committee on Transformation in Higher Education and the Ministerial Committee to Evaluate Textbooks for Discrimination.

He is a fellow of the International Academy of Education, the African Academy of Science, a Senior Fellow of NORRAG, Geneva Graduate Institute, a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, a former fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, the SARCHI Chair in Development Education, UNISA and the Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research, University of Alberta in Canada. He serves on the boards of a number of cultural, heritage, education and civil society structures.

Michael Cross passed away in 2021. He began his career as a lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of the Witwatersrand in 1986 where he also earned MEd (1986) and PhD (1994) degrees. He was, at the time of his passing, a Research-focused Professor in Higher Education at the University of Johannesburg. He was also a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Stockholm University and Jules-Vernes University in Amiens.

As a result of his extensive outreach work on the African continent, he was the Winner of the 2011–2012 award as Outstanding Mentor of Educational Researchers in Africa from the Association for Educational Development in Africa (ADEA). He was also awarded teaching and research fellowships at several institutions, including Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern University. Professor Cross was the author and co-author of several books, book chapters and numerous articles in leading scholarly journals. His books include Imagery of Identity in South African Education, 1880–1990 (Durham, Carolina Academic Press, 1999), No Easy Road: Transforming Higher Education in South Africa (Pretoria: Longman, 1998) and Unfulfilled Promise – Changing Schools in Mozambique (Addis Ababa:
OSSREA, 2011). Apart from his contribution as an education specialist for several major national education policy initiatives in South Africa, such as the National Commission on Higher Education and the Technical Committee on Norms and Standards for Educators, he also served as a member of education evaluation teams in Africa, Europe and USA.

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