A New History of Formal Schooling South Africa: 1658–1910

The book is the first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.

It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.

This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.

In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates.