Apartheid-era perspectives still feature in history textbooks, according to Minister of Education Kader Asmal
Minister of Education Kader Asmal cites the poor quality of history teaching at schools, the use of discredited apartheid-era textbooks, and the slide of history as a subject, as some of the reasons for the troubled state of history in schools.
Asmal made the comments at the launch of the South African National History Project in August, when he announced a 12-member team, led by June Bam, to review and rewrite the country’s history.
The Values in Education report, Asmal said, underlined the importance of promoting good and imaginative history teaching. Asmal said the authors of the History and Archaeology Panel report made several key findings, among them:
With inferior training and lean resources, many cling to rote learning – history is taught as a set of facts to be memorised and reproduced mechanically, rather than as a subject built around debate.
Many teachers continue to work from discredited apartheid-era textbooks.
The legacy of apartheid-era history is still strong in schools.
There is a need to train more history teachers in progressive methods.
Conflating history with geography in the generalised field of human and social sciences has compromised its virtues and eroded its status.
Asmal noted that the role of history in learning has been deteriorating. “Few educational administrators attach due importance to history in the learning process, just as few schools now position history as a core subject. This situation has arisen because, in the broadest sense, history has come to be seen by many parents and many pupils as a world which is lost.”
Asmal said the thrust of the South African History Project is to promote and enhance the status of history with the goal of restoring its position in the classroom.
The project will pursue this through the creation of forums for teachers, pupils and training specialists. The project will also direct its energies towards a review, revision and rewriting of history textbooks in co-operation with other bodies in the history field. Finally, it will concern itself with resurrecting general interest in the study of history by young people, thereby fortifyinging its humanising role in the schooling system.
The project has been made possible due to a R4-million donation from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
The members of the South African National History Committee are:
Maanda Mulaudzi (chairman): oral historian, the University of Cape Town.
Albert Grundlingh: head of history at the University of Stellenbosch.
Mark Gevisser: journalist, author and applied historian.
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie: senior lecturer at the University of the Western Cape.
Lindi Nqonji: senior history teacher at Chris Hani High School and founder of the Khayelitsha History Teachers’ Network.
Yonah Seleti: director of the Campbell Collections, University of Natal.
Jeff Guy: professor of history, University of Natal.
Ibrahim Abdullah: lecturer in African history, University of the Western Cape.
Sifiso Ndlovu: oral historian.
Luli Callinicos: founder of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Nanathamsanqa Tisani: founder of the Eyethu Imbali Oral History Project, and director of the Teaching and Learning Centre, Cape Tech.
Amanda Esterhuysen, archeologist, University of the Witwatersrand.
June Bam (chief executive officer): history curriculum specialist.
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, October 2001.