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Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga announced in February that she had appointed a ministerial committee to evaluate a broad sample of textbooks, and learning and teaching support material, for their content. She wanted to know how schools were dealing with diversity.
She was prompted to set up the inquiry for a number of reasons. One of the most material was the work of a researcher into textbooks at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC).
He claimed that too many of the textbooks used in South African schools demonstrated a lack of awareness of their shortcomings around diversity. Many went into second and third editions with the same racist, sexist and discriminatory images and texts with which they were launched – some containing derogatory images of women and black people.
They were constructed around idealised middle class constructions of social life – abundance in everything – not sensitive to the fact that many people live much more modest and even difficult lives. Not enough publishers seemed to be aware that the editorial selections they were making were exclusionary and even disrespectful of particular people.
The questions of race and racism have today been put on the public agenda by the events surrounding the challenges that poor and largely black students experience in gaining access to the country’s universities and by the exposure in public of a slew of racist utterances via social media. Providing further justification for the minister’s investigation has been the occurrence in the past year of a number of less publicly visible, but no less significant, incidents at schools. At least two incidents in the latter part of 2015 revealed deep issues. One of them saw children and their parents standing firm behind their apartheid-era racial labels – we “coloureds” and you “Africans” (or worse names) – and proclaiming their racial superiority and racial right to privilege: “This is our school. You people don’t belong here.”
What’s important is the kind of learning and understanding that is evident in the behaviour of people. The events show the extent to which prejudice and sometimes even hatred – bad learnt behaviour – underpin the decisions made by individuals and communities.
It is correct that the different communities of South Africa, as it must be for people everywhere, have the right to defend their identities. But that they will do so based on false understandings of their own value and toxic assumptions about people they consider “other” to themselves, must be a moment of pause for everybody.
It is true, it must be said, that young people are reinventing themselves in both conscious and unconscious resistance to this bad learning. They are making themselves anew into what important social commentators in the country have described as the “new South African”.
These “new” South Africans know that “race” and racism, gender, and many of the other differences that are part of their lives, are important parts of their social and cultural legacy that require some care. They are probably deeply confused by these realities, but know there is a need to live differently – more respectfully. They know the attitudes of their parents are not acceptable.
However, that the bad learning that continues to circulate in South African schools (and homes) remains so easily assumed, and so comfortably lived with – and even lived for – is something the country cannot ignore.
Minister Motshekga has thus asked the committee to undertake an evaluation of the textbooks that manifest the “closing” of the mind rather than its “opening”.
The committee will look at texts in English; an additional, preferably indigenous, language; mathematics; and a social science subject. It will look at how textbooks are dealing with the questions of inclusion and exclusion, and particularly how, in their content and imagery, they deal with the questions of stereotyping and discrimination. The minister is interested in developing a good understanding of how the textbook-publishing community in the country, the publishers and disseminators of teaching and learning material, have taken forward the country’s commitments to inclusion. How are the principles of nonracialism, an awareness of gender discrimination and sensitivity to the differences of religion, disability, sexual orientation, home language and other less obvious forms of differentiation practised?
The work the committee will undertake will, as studies of this kind typically do, focus on the obvious things – the narratives, the stories, the images. It will also look, however, at the use of texts – the pedagogical approaches of teachers. It will attempt to do classroom observations and the ways in which what could be considered “good” information and “bad” knowledge are managed by teachers. Are teachers aware of the politics of the content of the material they are mediating?
The committee will also attempt to assess what communities – parents in the main – understand about the texts and other materials their children are using. It will hold focus groups and public dialogues on this question.
Finally, it will make recommendations to the minister on the key policy imperatives relating to discrimination. These will talk to how texts are commissioned, how they are planned and designed, and how they could be used.
Professor Crain Soudien of the HSRC heads the committee of eight academics and educationists who will be conducting the
This piece forms part of a series of inquiry into textbooks.
