Education for the "African child": Distant illusion?

Abstract

One of the key features of post-apartheid South Africa has been an ongoing debate around access to quality education. Educational policy experts have decried what they have often termed a “dysfunctional” schooling system that fails to prepare students adequately for independent thinking and future life prospects. Prominent amongst the circulating debates have been important, yet peripheral issues such as resources, curriculum change and general inequality, forgetting the very real and systematic ways in which racial ideological thinking came to drive education in South Africa during apartheid.