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Could a subject like history get this “angry country” to learn how to understand others’ viewpoints without resorting to violence?
The history ministerial task team believes so, and has recommended that the department of basic education start phasing it in as a compulsory subject.
The team iterated the importance of history as a stand-alone school subject in its report on whether it should be made a compulsory for all children in school.
In the report the task team said “good history education promotes sympathetic and informed understanding of humanity and the human condition”.
This task team was appointed by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga in 2015. This was a year after the South African Democratic Teachers Union called for “compulsory teaching of relevant history” in schools.
“With history being compulsory we can teach our learners empathetic skills which help this angry country to learn how to understand others viewpoints without resorting to violence,” said Sadtu secretary-general Mugwena Maluleke.
“We need a country where the people are oriented towards service and leveraging our cultural and diversity capital,” he added.
“The [ministerial task team] recommends the implementation of a phased approach which would allow the basic education department to plan accordingly and for teachers to be trained and retrained in order to begin the process,” reads the report.
In the report the task team cautions against the selective teaching of history syllabus.
“There is strong circumstantial evidence that many schools in the [general education and training] phase are avoiding teaching South African history, particularly apartheid history and liberation history even though it is in the current curriculum.”
The report does not recommend a once-off overhaul of the existing Caps curriculum but rather the gradual phasing in of compulsory history, which will eventually result in a complete overhaul of Caps after five years of “careful planning”.
Maluleke also stressed that there needs to be another look at the existing curriculum.
“We the recurriculation process that will ensure that the skills learned are life skills and help us build a nation. The proficiency levels have to help our learners at both the conceptualisation and application phases of life,” he said.
In addition to this Maluleke said it was also critical to retrain teachers, a point covered in the report.
“We need more teachers and the continuous development of teachers to teach at the highest level so that we can realise the rationale of making history compulsory,” he said.
The task team urged the department to fund history teachers in its bursary schemes.
“The [ministerial task team] is of the opinion that history teachers should not be discriminated against and they have a democratic right for funding from the department’s bursary scheme: Funza Lushaka.”
Read the full report here.
