The launching of the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad) and targets set by the African Renaissance project have direct implications for education and training in South Africa and on the African continent.
Both of them aim to put Africa at the cutting edge of global development in this century. To achieve this aim, Africa’s under-development over the past few centuries and the ways in which this happened have to be addressed.
Education and training systems are at the centre of this process because the appropriate knowledge, skills and values could make the continent and South Africa competitive in the economic sphere, as well as contribute to narrowing the vast social inequalities that exist.
The difficulties lie however, in the fact that worldwide only a small percent of Africans have achieved effectively in the education traditions of the past three centuries. The vast majority are handicapped by an education system of ideas, processes and requirements that restrict access and mobility within it.
Curriculum 2005 is a framework that takes into account the reality of the colonial heritage by taking its best educational expressions and combining it with the flexibility of inclusion of local knowledge and experiences.
Properly understood and implemented, it holds the potential of enabling all learners, but particularly the disadvantaged, to find space and support for achieving high-level educational goals.
It has so far been hamstrung by a context of huge and complex wider issues: both national and international social and economic fluctuations; a legacy of large and varied inequalities; an over-quick implementation plan; and severe capacity constraints.
The revised C 2005 attempts to deal with some of these constraints by providing more clarity and support for teachers.
Some of the key changes introduced by the revised C2005 are the use of historically established canons and procedures of the knowledge areas, such as generalisations, algorithms, conceptual sequencing, and more time allocation to learning areas which are regarded as gateway (such as languages, mathematics and natural science). Because of the importance of democracy education and nation building, history has also been given more prominence in the social sciences.
Curriculum requirements are less distant from teacher development programmes. This could assist in steadying expectations in a context in which there has been too much looseness in the interpretation of the curriculum, and there has been insufficient support and guidance provided to teachers.
The difficulty presented by the revised C2005, however, is there is a risk of the curriculum not making sufficient allowance
for issues of de-colonisation of knowledge and the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems.
Both of these are important issues in South African education because they could enable black African learners to be more in touch with the cultural systems into which they were born. Their levels of performance could rise because of the removal of the barrier of foreign knowledge and language.
The revised C2005 rests on a knowledge tradition that is dominated by the Eurocentric heritage, if not in concept and content, then by virtue of the whole ensemble of practices that make a person educated. The majority of teachers, existing texts, schools and social settings reflect the views and attitudes of colonialism, and do not incorporate the indigenous knowledge systems of Africa and the decolonised world.
If left unattended, this situation could lead to only a small trickle of black learners succeeding in the school systems and the current pattern of differentiated racial and gender achievement in education remaining as it is.
The obstacles are the depths of the colonial heritage and consciousness across a wide spectrum of people, and the fact that the indigenous knowledge movement is still in the process of consolidating its work.
The way forward towards a more effective African education future is to codify African indigenous knowledge systems that are likely to contribute to the Nepad and African Renaissance project, combine them with the best knowledge and democratic traditions of the European heritage and package them into high quality and situationally relevant concepts, content, skills and values.