A Re-Examination of Key Curriculum Debates and Directions in South Africa

Abstract

The key issue with which the South African debate around curriculum reform has been concerned, as has been the case in many countries around the world, is what should be at its core. There is agreement in this debate that the curriculum should deal with South Africa’s apartheid legacy of exclusion and that it should prepare young people for the complexity of living in a new modern world order. There is little agreement, however, about what counts as valuable knowledge for meeting these purposes. In the process, as the new curriculum has been developed and revised, multiple schools of thought have emerged. Two, however, have taken clear form: social realism and social constructivism. The former took issue with what they described as post-modern relativism in the new curriculum. The target of their critique was the lost opportunity to affirm the importance of what they called “powerful knowledge.” The new curriculum manifested a susceptibility, in its weak delineation of the boundaries of different disciplines, to the prominence of everyday knowledge. What children needed to learn was powerful knowledge that contained understandings of the deep grammars, restricted codes, and specialist areas of knowledge. In response, constructivists argued, through concepts such as “funds of knowledge,” that South African children inhabited a world of multiple knowledges and that it was important that they were able to valorize the legitimacy of these knowledges, including indigenous forms, in their formal learning experiences. The debate is ongoing and reaches into the heart of policymaking in South Africa.