State of Transition: post-apartheid educational reform in South Africa

Abstract

In the space of seven years, there have been at least a dozen major evaluations of education and transition since Nelson Mandela's African National Congress brought to power the first democratic and non-racial government in the history of South Africa. These reviews of education reform in the post-apartheid period (1994+) have appeared in 'special issues' of international journals (Gilmour & Soudien, 2001; Pendelbury & Enslin, 1998; Williams et al., 1997; Asmal & James, 2001), in edited volumes (Kallaway et al., 1998; Jansen & Christie, 1999; Sayed & Jansen, 2001; Taylor & Vinjevold, 1999), in single-authored monographs (Hartshorne, 1999), in collected conference or seminar proceedings (Centre for Education Policy Development, 1998) and in a range of individual journal publications too numerous to list (see special bibliography in Sayed & Jansen, 2001). Against this background, a reasonable question that arises with the recent publication of State of Transition is: what exactly does this new book contribute to the knowledge base on educational reforms after apartheid? I will return to this framing question later. It is fair, in reviewing a new book, to begin by establishing the goals set for the publication by the author(s). In the words of Clive Harber, main purpose of this book ... is to provide a relatively concise overview of educational transition – to document, discuss and analyse key changes (and continuities) in South African education since the end of apartheid (7-8). In pursuit of this object, Harber covers in eighty-seven pages and five chapters, topics as diverse as policy, and government (Chapter 1); race, language and gender (Chapter 2); qualifications, curriculum and assessment (Chapter 3); the culture of learning and teaching as expressed through 'life in schools' (Chapter 4); and the problem of teacher identity in teacher education and practice (Chapter 5). What does he make of all these reforms? Professor Harber concludes that South Africa has witnessed dramatic and largely constructive changes in educational policy (85) but that a series of 'barriers to implementing reform policies on the ground remain dauntingly high' (86). Among these barriers he includes the legacy of violence and inequality, the complex and rushed nature of education reforms, and the inadequate inservice training of teachers. Harber concludes, on a somewhat damp and familiar note, that change takes time. After all, Britain began its transition to democracy some eight hundred years ago in 1215 and has still got nowhere near eliminating bigotry and racism, let alone democratising its education (87). The book has some appealing attributes. It has a relaxed style in which the author blends personal observation of education reform with some of the research of his colleagues at the University of Natal in South Africa, where he served as Chair of the School of Education between 1995 and 1999. It provides useful insights on one or two topics seldom analysed in the published reviews of education reform; in this regard his analysis of finance and redistribution is particularly interesting in that it shows the competing influences on the new government as it sought to create greater equity within the school system while retaining the confidence of white parents in the public education system. And it locates the review, albeit weakly, in the context of globalisation pressures on the Third-World state and the impulse for democratisation fuelled by the years of anti-apartheid struggle.