3870146

The Curriculum Journal Vol. 11 No. 1 Spring 2000 69–85

Education, citizenship and
difference in the South African
transition: policy, politics and
practice
E L A I N E U N T E R H A LT E R
Institute of Education, University of London

ABSTRACT

The article looks at three approaches to analysing the relationship between education,
citizenship and difference that have been evident in the transition to democracy in
South Africa. First, it examines the position that education moulds good citizens and
overcomes discriminatory differences, which is evident in the South African Education
Policy Act. (This position is similar to that expounded in the Crick Report.) Second,
it looks at the view that education is an enactment of citizenship and a celebration of
difference. This is articulated in the new South African Curriculum 2005, which cele-
brates the school as just one of a number of learning spaces, but which is only slowly
being implemented with considerable dif culty in overcoming deeply entrenched and
multifaceted discriminatory views. Third, it looks at the view, articulated in the South
African Constitution of 1996, that education is a relatively autonomous space and that
in this particular institutional space education, difference and citizenship are in tension.
While there is potential for a creative dialogue to emerge in this historically formed
space, preliminary research ndings indicate how dif cult and diffuse the process of
transformation is likely to be.

KEY WORDS

citizenship; South Africa; Crick Report; teaching and learning.

INTRODUCTION

The South African transition to democracy in the 1990s provides a useful case-
study of the complexities of the relationship between education, citizenship

The Curriculum Journal ISSN 0958–5176 © 2000 British Curriculum Foundation

70 T H E C U R RI CU L U M JO U R N A L Vol. 11 No. 1

and difference. In a recent article, which drew on issues that emerged at the
particular moment of creating a new state, I outlined how the literature regard-
ing education, citizenship and difference can be grouped into three broad
frameworks (Unterhalter, 1999a). First, there are works which argue that the
relationship of education and citizenship is causal. Education moulds citizens
and in the process ways of negotiating and overcoming the dif culties of
differences (race, class, gender, ethnicity, disability to name but a few) are
learned. This is the mainstream position and underpins the recommendations
of the Crick commission and the current policy proposals regarding citizen-
ship education in Britain (Crick, 1998). Second, there is a position that has
characterized some theorists of radical democracy, that is, that the enactment
of citizenship is itself educative (learning through doing). The implication of
this is that the activities of education are the same as the activities of politics.
The terms used by these theorists for describing the enactment of citizenship
utilize a vocabulary that echoes contemporary education theory with its stress
on understanding, dialogue and critical re ection. In this position difference
is not a disruption to be overcome and incorporated, as in the rst position,
but a feature of social reality to be acknowledged and engaged with through
processes termed transversal dialogue by Patricia Hill Collins and Nira Yuval-
Davis (Hill Collins, 1990; Yuval-Davis, 1997); that is the process of under-
standing and engaging creatively with difference. The third position I outlined
pointed out that both the rst and the second position ignored (for different
reasons) the speci c institutional space of education with regard to citizen-
ship, and the complexities, contradictions, opportunities and closures implied
by this semi-autonomy. In this third position, I believe, education and citizen-
ship are held in creative tension.
In this article I want to utilize the framework I have developed in order
to analyse a number of key policy papers of the South African transition, in
order to show in somewhat greater depth how the three positions I have out-
lined are expressed in policy texts. I also want to re ect brie y on some of
the dif culties that have emerged in South Africa in putting particular
formulations of the link between education and citizenship into practice.
The article is divided into three sections. The rst section provides some
background relating to the processes through which a range of new edu-
cation policies came to be formulated and adopted in South Africa up to the
mid-1990s and brie y contextualizes the three policy texts to be discussed.
The second section looks at the different views regarding the relationship
between education and citizenship which emerge from the three texts – the
Education Policy Act of 1996, Curriculum 2005, published in 1997, and the
Constitution of 1996. In the third section I provide a brief overview of how
these policy texts have related to politics and education practice, drawing
out some of the implications for theorizing the relationship of education and
citizenship.

C I TI ZE N SH IP E D UC AT IO N IN S O UT H A FR IC A 71

TRANSFORMING EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA,
1990–7

Apartheid education was marked not only by segregation, under-resourcing
for the majority of children and punitive regimes of control for pupils and
teachers, but also by curricula infused with racism, sexism and approaches to
knowledge and culture which failed all but a tiny minority (Kallaway, 1984;
Nkomo, 1990; Unterhalter et al., 1991; Nasson and Samuel, 1990; Jansen,
1991; Cross, 1992). Curriculum transformers of the 1990s characterized the
past era in terms of the use of the curriculum to promote social inequality
(NEPI, 1993a: 104; NEPI, 1993b).
The transition period, from 1990 up to the elections of 1994, was marked
by an intensive period of policy debate and policy-making. The 1980s had
witnessed a high level of popular mobilization in protest at apartheid edu-
cation, with curriculum and governance issues one of the key demands of the
movement for People’s Education organized through the NECC (National
Education Crisis Committee, later the National Education Co-ordinating
Committee). In the early 1990s the scale of popular protest waned and the
NECC ceded leadership in the policy-making process to academics and
policy professionals, many of whom had organizational links with the ANC,
or the mass democratic movement that had opposed apartheid inside South
Africa (Badat, 1995, 1997; Chisholm and Fuller, 1996). As a result, the main
space for articulating political and educational demands moved from the
public street demonstration to the private negotiating rooms of commercial
conference centres or parliament. Demands, which had been written by
hand on pieces of cardboard or passed orally by public acclaim at open meet-
ings, were now translated into an of cial language of pacts and legal docu-
ments, written by highly educated professionals and word-processed by
machines. It was this largely professionalized policy community that led the
NECC’s own policy development exercise NEPI (the National Education
Policy Investigation) and which helped formulate the ANC Education Policy
Framework and a supplementary document on strategies for the implemen-
tation of this framework (IPET). (See NEPI, 1993a; ANC, 1994a, 1994b.)
Throughout 1994, many of the key steps identi ed by IPET were put into
place. A core group began working on an Education White Paper, drawing
on the ANC Education Policy Framework. A National Commission on
Higher Education was appointed in 1995 and the planning projects that
would feed into the National Quali cations Framework (NQF) continued
their discussions under the aegis of the National Training Board. When in
1995 and 1996 key legislation was formulated – on the basis of the White
Paper of 1995 regarding compulsory education for all children, the National
Quali cations Framework and the new curriculum – the committees that had
up till then been meeting in the spirit of transformation bodies changed gear


and, largely with the same membership, became policy-making bodies for the
new government, aiming, in the working title of one NQF document to put
‘ esh on the skeleton’ of ideas that had been formulated in the transition.
In the space of ten years, between 1986 and 1996, discussion about future
education policy had moved from the streets and prisons to the comfort of
of ces. The mood of these discussions had switched from one charged with
an atmosphere of secrecy, fear, passion and high hopes to a different key. Now
the stress was on formal meeting procedures, compromises with powerful
constituencies like the old bureaucrats, the tedium of long agendas and the
low horizons of achievable objectives. In the 1980s much of the driving force
of education policy discussion was very general aspiration for national liber-
ation; in the 1990s side by side with these hopes were speci c aspirations for
personal career advancement and implementable administrative changes. In
the 1980s much of the discussion about education policy change had been
linked explicitly or implicitly with critiques of the links between capitalism
and apartheid and the ways in which the education system was complicit in
this relationship. In the 1990s a more differentiated view of capitalism and
social transformation emerged. For some, capitalism was ‘the only game in
town’ and South Africa’s prosperity, and therefore its education policy, had
to face the realities of the particular skill demands of global capital; for others,
it was possible for there to be a critical engagement between South African
policy-makers and the forces of globalization (Kallaway and Kruss, 1997;
Unterhalter and Samson, 1998). Two of the documents discussed in this
paper, the Education Policy Act of 1996 and Curriculum 2005, published in
1997, emerge out of policy communities that comprised ‘poachers turned into
gamekeepers’, that is, policy communities with radical histories adapting to
a new locus of power with a new government.
However, in contrast to the movement from populism to bureaucracy,
which characterized the speci c realm of education policy-making, the
writing of the Constitution, which has an important section on education,
entailed the opposite dynamic. Here, the rst phase of work had consisted of
discussions among lawyers and politicians, largely detached from mass con-
stituencies. Out of the deliberations of ‘professionals’ came the Interim
Constitution, on the basis of which the 1994 elections were conducted. The
1994 Interim Constitution was as much the product of bargaining and
realpolitik as of principle (Friedman, 1993; M. Murray, 1994; Frost, 1996;
Guelke, 1999). However, the ANC, unlike some of its political opponents,
had insisted that this document could only be an Interim Constitution and
that mass consultation and a democratic process of decision-making was
essential before a nal Constitution was adopted (Butler, 1998). After the
elections an intensive period of constitution making began, probably one of
the most democratic processes of constitution writing in history. Elected
members of a Constitutional Assembly held meetings throughout the


country where they elicited people’s ideas for the new constitution. An inten-
sive media campaign encouraged people to send in submissions. At the same
time the different political parties in South Africa articulated their vision
through members of the Constitutional Assembly. A number of different
committees of the Constitutional Assembly focused on collecting views in
particular areas – for example, gender and labour. A draft Constitution was
published in November 1995 and endorsed by parliament in May 1996.
However, certain issues were referred back to the Constitutional Court. The
nal version of the Constitution only came into effect at the end of 1996.
While it is not clear that the mass meetings on the Constitution between
1994 and 1995 brought any substantive new ideas to the Constitutional
Assembly (the interjecting of new demands was often seen as frivolous or the
result of a misunderstanding of the process of negotiation and policy for-
mation (Weekly Mail, 1996)), they did mean a greater degree of legitimation
was accorded the process of constitution making. Kruss has outlined how the
process of mass debate allowed the balance of political forces to shift so that
clauses on education became much less defensively concerned with the needs
of narrowly speci ed constituencies and more unambiguously phrased in
terms of rights and equity (Kruss, 1999: 2–3). This search for wide-ranging
popular endorsement was not deemed necessary by the education policy
community, who tended to include in their committees representatives of key
constituencies, like teacher unions or employers, but paid very little atten-
tion to whether these representatives were or were not in touch with the
groups they were meant to represent. Some of the most trenchant critics of
the new educational dispensation have highlighted how the considerable
changes in approach to the curriculum and quali cations proposed by the
new policy had not been discussed in depth with a range of education con-
stituencies, most notably teachers (Jansen, 1997, 1998).
Generally, all three policy texts resonate with the demands of mass-based
movements in the 1980s regarding citizenship and education. All three were,
in the nal analysis, drafted by policy professionals and not by activists or
practitioners. Given these similarities, it is interesting that the three docu-
ments give such different emphasis to the relationship between education,
citizenship and difference.

CITIZENSHIP, EDUCATION AND DIFFERENCE IN
THREE SOUTH AFRICAN POLICY DOCUMENTS

The three positions regarding the relationship of education, citizenship and
difference, which I elucidated in my earlier paper, can be found articulated in
three policy texts. The Education Policy Act is a very clear expression of the
position that education moulds citizens and differences need to be overcome


in the interests of the nation. Curriculum 2005 utilizes many of the assump-
tions of the second position, that is that citizenship is learned through experi-
ence in the classroom, where difference and dialogue are acknowledged. The
ways in which the classroom is a special ‘space’, different in certain areas to
the ‘space’ of citizenship, is not considered; in fact the similarities between
the classroom and the street or the community as learning spaces are stressed.
The third position, that education is a semi-autonomous space for citizens
with differences, emerges in the Constitution of 1996. The texts of the three
documents illustrate these different approaches.

THE EDUCATION POLICY ACT

The Education Policy Act of 1996, which provided much of the framework
for the educational initiatives of the new government and speci ed the prin-
ciples that were to guide these initiatives, viewed education as the instrument
of citizenship. The Act restated the entitlement to education set out in the
Interim Constitution, but it also indicated that it is through education that
the advancement and protection of the fundamental rights of everyone shall
be achieved (South Africa, 1996a: 4). The need to use education to develop
citizenship is expressed clearly:
The policy contemplated . . . shall be directed toward . . . enabling the
education system to contribute to the full personal development of each
student, and the moral, social, cultural, political and economic develop-
ment of the nation at large, including the advancement of democracy,
human rights and the peaceful resolution of disputes.
It can be seen that the Act elides personal development of each student and
the development of the ‘nation at large’. It is implied that the one entails the
other. An articulation of difference, for example regarding gender or race,
which may assist personal, but not national, development (or vice versa) is
not contemplated. Education is thus portrayed as a means to overcome differ-
ence, to form an integrated nation, to resolve, not acknowledge, con ict. In
subsequent clauses the speci c role of education in promoting gender equal-
ity (but interestingly not racial equality) is mentioned. The Act, in specify-
ing the purposes of education – to encourage lifelong learning, ‘to cultivate
skills, disciplines and capacities necessary for reconstruction and develop-
ment’ – identi es its utility for projects of nation building. In all of this the
Education Policy Act is closer to the views on education and citizenship of
nineteenth-century Europe and the newly independent states of Africa in the
1960s than to the debates on radical democracy in South Africa and Europe
in the 1990s. The Act also identi es the purpose of education with regard to
‘encouraging independent and critical thought, and to promote enquiry,


research and the advancement of knowledge’; but these aims, which allow
some space for a critical education of citizens and an exploration of differ-
ence, appear subordinated to the ‘greater good’ of the needs of the ‘nation at
large’.
The Education Policy Act acknowledges the need for ‘broad public par-
ticipation in the development of education policy and the representation of
stakeholders in the governance of the education system’ (South Africa, 1996a:
5). Thus there is a notion of education linked to the domain of the community
and not imposed from above or consumed by separate possessive individuals.
But the notion of stakeholders, imported from an economistic version of the
political, casts civil society in a particular mould. Civil society, it is implied,
is not a body with whom a constantly shifting dialogue about ‘the good of
the nation’ might take place, but more a disparate set of interests who will
(unproblematically) represent their sectional stake in any discussions about
policy directions. This rather limited role does not appear as a strong articu-
lation of active citizenship, but merely an expansion of the notion of posses-
sive individuals to encompass possessive communities or stakeholders. (For
a discussion of the concept of stakeholders with regard to the South African
Schools Act of 1996, see Sayed and Carrim, 1997; for a theoretical critique of
the terms see Morrow, 1998; for a discussion of the history of the concept of
stakeholders in South Africa, see Unterhalter, 1998.)
The general orientation of the Education Policy Act is to identify edu-
cation as the servant of larger projects. The (ungendered, deracialized) indi-
vidual is depicted engaging in education as part of a route of attachment to
undertakings like ‘the moral, social, cultural, political and economic
development of the nation’ (South Africa, 1996a: 4). The link between edu-
cation and citizenship outlined in the Education Policy Act appears to be
formulated in terms of education promoting citizenship and integration with
the nation. It is a conceptualization that, despite gestures towards debates
with stakeholders, avoids engaging with social complexity and any notions
of difference.
The limitations of this view are drawn out by feminist political theorists.
Much of the deeply entrenched discrimination against women occurs not in
the public sphere, where they have formal rights of citizenship and partici-
pation, but in the so-called private spheres of the family, religious or com-
munity groups. These domains are often legitimated by the state and their
deeply discriminatory practices considered beyond the remit of of cial
policy. Citizenship education may fail to engage with the ways in which the
family and civil society are not helpmates in the project of building national
democracy, but may indeed undermine some of the values of tolerance, equal-
ity and justice citizenship education seeks to teach. In those circumstances
the position articulated by the South African Education Policy Act could fail
to engage with the sources of racism, sexism and other injustices.


CURRICULUM 2005

Curriculum 2005, issued in 1997, contrasts with the Education Policy Act’s
strong vision of national good. Curriculum 2005 outlines the curriculum to
be followed in schools. It tends to place the national good rather schemati-
cally as a rubric in its promotional materials and opening statements re-
garding aims (National Department of Education, 1997a, 1997b; South
Africa, 1997). Much of Curriculum 2005 explores questions of difference and
many of the learning outcomes are explicitly about understanding difference
using dialogue and re ection. But, despite the considerable concern with
questions of difference, there are puzzling omissions and inconsistencies with
regard to difference throughout the document. For example, approaches to
learning about rights, or overcoming gender and race discrimination, appear
and disappear in different sections. They are to be found in some of the
formulations of outcomes, range statements and assessment criteria pro-
duced for the eight learning areas, but not in others (South Africa, 1997;
Unterhalter and Samson, 1998; Jansen, 1998; Unterhalter 1999b; Enslin and
Pendlebury, 1999). There is no consistent approach in Curriculum 2005 to
the question of citizenship and difference. Partly this re ects the dispersal of
responsibility for drafting Curriculum 2005 among many different commit-
tees. Partly it re ects concern that developing an understanding of South
African society does not exclude other components of the curriculum. But
largely, in my view, it indicates the outcomes-based education (OBE) phil-
osophy that underpins Curriculum 2005, where knowledge is enacted; the
student is not a passive recipient of information. Because so much stress is
placed on learning as doing and displaying outcomes, little content is pre-
scribed. The assumption is that the skills and understanding developed
through OBE, where the teacher is the facilitator, map easily onto the world
of work or of democratic citizenship.
In Curriculum 2005 a whole range of general and particular differences
are acknowledged and diversity is constantly stressed and utilized. In con-
trast with the Education Policy Act, Curriculum 2005 tends not to make too
tight a connection between the lofty national citizenship goals of education
and the shifting processes of day-to-day classroom interactions. It is sug-
gested, probably correctly, that the necessarily diverse forms of citizenship
will daily be enacted in the classroom. Very little attention is given as to how
the speci c conditions in classrooms – questions of differences in resources,
teachers’ experience, systems of assessment, the different backgrounds of
children, different approaches to management and governance, to name but
a few – might impinge on this diversity. Do these all just knit together as
part of a rich fabric of difference, or do they shape the possibilities of
citizenship in particular ways that need to be acknowledged and examined,
not just celebrated?


THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTION

By contrast with the Education Policy Act, the Constitution of 1996 explic-
itly acknowledges a space for difference. But it does so less in terms of the
‘transversal dialogue’ celebrated by Curriculum 2005, and more in terms of a
quite complex way of thinking about the relationship of education, citizen-
ship and difference, utilizing the notion that education is a relatively auton-
omous sphere. Education and citizenship, it is implied, comprise a converging
but different terrain.
The clauses on education and the extent to which difference in relation to
education should be tolerated or engaged with were some of its most con-
tested clauses in both the interim and nal Constitution. Kruss points out
how the Interim Constitution of 1993 provided for the right to establish
schools based on ‘common culture, language or religion’, providing there was
no racial discrimination. By contrast, the nal Constitution of 1996 makes a
more robust statement that monolingual or monocultural schools must be
subject to principles of equity, practicability, redress and anti-discrimination
(Kruss, 1999). These schools are thus to be scrutinized and regulated by the
state. The 1996 Constitution guarantees to everyone the right to a basic edu-
cation, including adult basic education, and commits the state ‘through
reasonable measures’ to make further education, that is beyond four years of
basic education, ‘available and accessible’ to all (South Africa, 1996b: 14). The
Constitution confers on members of particular cultural, religious or linguis-
tic communities rights to enjoy their culture, practise their religion and use
their language, to form associations and other organs of civil society and to
establish their own independent educational institutions. However, the
Constitution is explicit that these rights must not be exercised in a manner
inconsistent with any provision of the Bill of Rights (South Africa, 1996b:
15). By this means the Constitution wishes both to allow particular collec-
tivities the right to continue to exist and conduct educational projects, while
wishing to stress that these projects must not enshrine discrimination as out-
lawed in other sections of the Bill of Rights. Kruss (1999) and Carrim (1998)
have outlined how the combination of broad statements about education and
rights in the Constitution and the absence of programmes and strategies
regarding how these should be implemented at the provincial, school and
classroom level have paved the way for the re-emergence of discrimination
and injustice in schooling. I will return to this in the nal section of the article.
It is evident that the South African Constitution contains a view of
citizenship that acknowledges diversity. How does this acknowledgement of
difference – at its negative and positive poles – in ect the formulation of a
relationship between education and citizenship? In exploring this I want to
look at three themes: (i) the debates about rights that underpinned the
making of the South African Constitution and the implication of these for


the conception of education; (ii) the notion of difference within the Con-
stitution and the implications of this for thinking about education;
(iii) assumptions within the Constitution about schools and the possibilities
and limitations these place on teaching about citizenship and difference.
The debates about rights that informed the drafting of the Constitution
saw lawyers, in the main, grappling with questions of the social construction
of rights. Some of the key debates with regard to the drafting of the Consti-
tution concerned the extent to which the document should attempt to secure
social and economic rights, or only political rights (Sachs, 1990; Mureinik,
1992; Haysom, 1992; van Wyk, Dugard et al., 1994; Liebenberg, 1995a). In
this debate issues of gender equity were conceptualized in terms of women
using political rights and the Constitution to advance social and economic
rights. Feminist interventions were concerned to utilize state power to ensure
areas of discrimination against women were not left intact because they
entailed a wider concept of rights than that of narrow liberal political theory.
As Sandra Liebenberg wrote concerning the need to view social and econ-
omic rights as indeed justiciable:
The exclusion of social and economic rights from the constitution would
not only fail to re ect prevailing trends in international human rights
law, but would also fail in creating an integrated framework for demo-
cratic governance in South Africa. This is not so much an issue of
jurisprudential possibility, but of political will. (Liebenberg, 1995b: 378)
The extent to which the Constitution could be used to advance vertical rights,
that is, rights against the state, or horizontal rights, that is, rights against
private individuals or non-state bodies, was an area of much discussion. Here
feminist debate was adamant that if the Constitution could not secure hori-
zontal rights, many of the areas in which women were discriminated against
– the family, religious communities, customary law – would be ruled outside
the purview of the Bill of Rights (Kadalie, 1995; Kathree, 1995; Liebenberg,
1995b).
The civil society debate, or more accurately set of debates (Glaser, 1997),
also impinged on the ways in which rights came under scrutiny. This complex
set of discussions, which had begun in the mid-1980s as part of discussions
about political strategy by opposition forces, became in the 1990s a set of
contestations about the limits and nature of the power of the new state.
Watchdog bodies, like the Human Rights Commission appointed in 1996 and
the Gender Commission appointed in 1997, constituted themselves partly in
terms of articulating the views of civil society on the extent to which the spirit
of the Constitution was being ful lled. However, their success in distancing
themselves from government has been limited. Their ability to provide tren-
chant critiques or directions for action with regard to human rights violations
or gender injustices in speci c institutions, for example schools (Wolpe et al.,


1997) or prisons, has been limited. The wide-ranging debate about rights that
informed the constitution-making process entailed an exploration of ques-
tions of difference; but education was not explicitly part of this debate. It was
considered, more by implication than direct analysis, as the realm both of
state policy and of civil society.
This history has led to the Constitution as text suggesting a multilayered
notion of difference. This entails a complex relationship between education
and citizenship. In a number of ways the document recognizes difference and
attempts to work with principles of equity and justice to overcome the injus-
tices to which difference has been linked. Thus the Constitution is founded
on values of:
(a) Human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement
of human rights and freedoms.
(b) Non-racialism and non-sexism.
(c) Supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.
(d) Universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular
election and a multiparty system of democratic government to
ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness. (South Africa,
1996b: 3)
The Constitution pivots citizenship in relation to Marshall’s notion of
citizenship operating on three levels of economic, political and social rights.
But in addition it incorporates a universalist concern with ‘human rights and
freedoms’ and an acknowledgement of particularly pernicious differences –
racism and sexism – that need to be overcome.
The Constitution acknowledges positive dimensions of difference, rst in
recognizing nine of cial languages and af rming that because of
the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages
of our people the state must take practical and positive measures to
elevate the status and advance the use of these languages. (South Africa,
1996b: 4)
In addition, other even more marginalized languages (including sign language)
are acknowledged and the Constitution commits the state to create conditions
for their development, use and respect (ibid.). The Bill of Rights acknowledges
diversity of race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic and social
origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief,
culture, language and birth and forbids discrimination on these grounds
(South Africa, 1996b: 7). The South African Constitution thus contains a view
of citizenship that acknowledges diversity. While grappling with this diversity
must be a key undertaking of the education system, the Constitution does not
dictate in injunctions how diversity is to be translated from passive entitle-
ment into actual enjoyment of rights in educational institutions.


The Constitution is relatively reticent regarding detailed commentary
about schools as spaces for public education. The Constitution acknowledges
diversity, which aligns it both with the South African civil society advocates,
many of whose views found expression in Curriculum 2005, and with the
theorists of radical democracy, or creole liberalism, a term used by the South
African legal theorists, Woolman and Davis (1996). But the Constitution does
not privilege critical pedagogy or transversal dialogue in the ways some
writers in this tradition do. The Constitution recognizes difference and
commits itself to equity, but is adamant on the existence of a range of differ-
ent institutional spheres over which it has jurisdiction, one of which is edu-
cation. The implication is that, unlike the suggestion in Curriculum 2005 that
the school is just another space for everyday life, the Constitution speci es a
particular institutional space for education subject to speci c laws, where all
practices are implicitly under a high level of scrutiny, although the capacity
to effect this at present remains limited.
Yet in some ways the clauses of the Constitution dealing with education
are quite vague and this is undoubtedly partly because of the enormous dif -
culties entailed in reaching agreement on these issues, primarily between the
ANC and the National Party. In contrast with the very tight delimitation of
roles and activities outlined with regard to employment, for example, edu-
cation is left loose and unspeci ed. In contrast with the view that education
should be used to promote citizenship, as suggested by the Education Policy
Act, for example, the South African Constitution sets broad parameters of
rights, and devolves education provision to state institutions and culturally
identi ed bodies of civil society. It is from this position that the diverse views
on education and citizenship identi ed in Curriculum 2005 and the Edu-
cation Policy Act, discussed above, emerge. Education, according to the
Constitution, will not necessarily advance citizenship, but rather citizenship
secures (some) education.
These three South African policy texts, therefore, epitomize very different
understandings of the relationship between education and citizenship. The
Education Policy Act sees the education system creating a particular form of
‘good citizen’ who will be committed to the national good. While Curricu-
lum 2005 makes some gestures in this direction, it is also concerned with the
particularities of difference and dialogue across difference. The overall
impression of the document is that citizenship entails negotiating difference,
not always just to acquire economic competitiveness or smooth national inte-
gration. The Constitution also accords particular importance to difference,
but attempts to specify certain institutional conditions under which its posi-
tive aspects might ourish and its negative dimensions diminish. In the nal
section of the article I want to consider some of the ways in which policy has
been put into practice and some of the questions regarding education and
citizenship that emerge.


PUTTING POLICY INTO PRACTICE

The rst approach, using the education system to form a common citizen-
ship, can currently be seen both being put into practice but also, to some
extent, being undermined. In the wake of the Education Policy Act of 1996,
the South African Schools Act made it illegal to deny children access to
school on the grounds of race, gender or poverty. Schools have opened to all
children and the education system does, potentially, offer the space to educate
all children in a common citizenship. However, neither the South African
Schools Act, nor subsequent administrative measures to allocate human and
nancial resources to the most needy schools, can overcome a long history
of deep divisions and inequities in South African schooling. The aspiration
to build a common citizenship out of a single education system continues to
be threatened by two features of post-1994 South Africa. First, there are very
deep divisions between different types of schools. Some are well resourced,
offering excellent learning environments, while others lack basic resources
like teachers who attend to their duties, water and learning materials (EPU
Review, 1998; Christie, 1998). Second, the reconstitution of identities of
whiteness in schools are making for increasingly exclusive enclaves of Jewish,
Greek or Afrikaans children who, in increasing numbers, attend ethnically
circumscribed schools (Carrim, 1995). In some schools that have nominally
desegregated the maintenance of separate language groups by the school is
accompanied by widespread racism, noticeably in the form of verbal or
physical abuse by white Afrikaans speaking children against black English
speakers (Vally and Dalamba, 1999). This new division between schools
suggests that, side by side with identities of South Africanness and common
citizenship, other identities – which may potentially challenge a common
citizenship – are being formed.
The second approach to citizenship and education, exploring difference
through Curriculum 2005, is still in its infancy. The new curriculum is being
introduced very slowly, and the resources in terms of teachers’ training, new
materials and critical debate regarding implementation are all sorely stretched.
Pessimists, like Jansen, consider the lack of resources will abort the curricu-
lum initiative (Jansen, 1998). Others hold a watching brief (Vally, 1999). After
the 1999 elections the new Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, made ensur-
ing the success of Curriculum 2005 through supporting teachers and the
development of learning resources one of his key priorities (Asmal, 1999). It
is probably impossible for the aspirations entailed in the second position to
be realized fully everywhere, even given the new drive and energy mobilized
by the appointment of Asmal. Indeed, Kruss has pointed to very super cial
multiculturalism as an aspect of curriculum development in the best resourced
schools in South Africa and the maintenance of very uniform cultures of
poverty in the worst. She has thus questioned whether curriculum change


entails anything other than an engagement with essentialized different identi-
ties of pupils (Kruss, 1999).
With regard to the notion of the critical tension between education and
citizenship implied in the third position, it is partly out of this that the under-
mining of the rst two positions emerges. It is because schools are semi-
autonomous that they can subvert notions of common citizenship and the
positive exploration of difference. However, a much less negative reading of
the third position would be the ways in which schools as special spaces allow
for the reproduction of dominant notions of citizenship, as well as critical
re ections on these. The generation currently completing secondary school,
Mandela’s children, who have been schooled under conditions of transition,
will provide interesting evidence of whether this is indeed the case. Much of
the research with regard to questions of race and desegregation is pessimistic
about the nature and types of changes that are being effected in schools (Vally
and Dalamba 1999; Kruss, 1999), but work with teachers and pupils regard-
ing complex questions of identity, citizenship and difference has not yet been
done.
What are the implications of these different emphases regarding education
and citizenship both in South Africa and beyond? The three texts indicate a
range of approaches to education and citizenship. There are dominant ideas
that are not unique to South Africa: these are that children can and should
learn to be citizens and that the nature of citizenship is uncontested. Never-
theless, there are also dissenting ideas regarding the exclusionary and dis-
criminatory assumptions that might be masked by citizenship as a general
good, and the ways that children can develop a deeper and more critical
understanding of this. Curriculum 2005 attempts this by suggesting there is
no special learning space in the school, that children need to ‘learn life’. The
Constitution, however, suggests the importance of maintaining a special insti-
tutional space for children to learn, indicating that this is different from, but
has some relation to, for example, a political or religious organization, their
homes or the street.
It appears to me that unless the nature of this different space – the school –
is recognized in thinking about citizenship and education, a number of politi-
cal problems will emerge. If the rst position is adopted, the school will be
linked with one dominant group’s understanding of the nature of citizenship
and the nation, and dissent and critique will be marginalized. If the second
position is adopted, learning at school may be indistinguishable from that in
any site of civil society. Thus arguments for the use of public resources cannot
be made. The inevitable selection of certain groupings in civil society, and not
others, to have a voice in the citizenship classes will not be fair or practicable.
Thus very special attention needs to be given to citizenship and education not
simply as features of rights, or as elaborated in details regarding subjects in a
curriculum but also as constantly changing relationships in different historical
conditions. The disjuncture between policy and practice noted in South Africa


between 1994 and 1999 indicates how dif cult this process is. The relation-
ship between education and citizenship will always be in tension, realized in
speci c institutional and historical spaces. These spaces will change under
different conditions, but their shape, their material underpinnings and how
these link to certain selected meanings of citizenship, need to be made explicit
and analysed, not just implicitly assumed. My aspiration is for education to
be both a site for young citizens to engage with difference, and also a site
where both citizenship and schooling can come under critical examination.

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