KAREN PRESS looks at Kagiso Human and Social Sciences Grade 7 by Marianne Kapp, Zelda Mes and Andrew Smith (Kagiso, R32,45)
Kagiso Human and Social Science presents an odd combination of old and new elements: a chapter on sources of information itemises oral tradition, personal history and several others, respecting the curriculum’s orientation towards awareness of the ways in which historical truths are produced.
However, a chapter on technology presents a set of facts about technological developments in Europe and North America. There is a gesture to Africa in the comment, ”Farmers in Egypt and Europe discovered that by using a system of crop rotation, the soil was given a chance to recover.” For the rest, it reproduces the myth of technology as the gift of Euro-American males to the world. Overall, information is presented almost entirely through text — in this respect the book functions exactly like the old history books. I found only one place where the reader has to interpret visually — the map exercise. Some ”information” is simply nonsense. For example, ”Poems can be tangible, which means that they describe people or events … or they can be abstract, which means that they tell us about feelings.” The activity following this asks the reader to say if a given poem is tangible or abstract. A homeland is defined as ”an area in the old South Africa reserved for particular African people”. It is hard to imagine what a learner will make of this statement.
Instructions for activities are sometimes confusing; questions posed are often closed rather than open so that the potential for exploring topics is shut down. I was disturbed by the question in the peer assessment grid which asks groups to decide on the ”significance of the contribution” of each member — a shadow of the old curriculum’s orientation towards ranking students.
One of the ways HSS has moved beyond the previous history-geography notion of social studies is in the focus on questions of social and moral values. The chapter Communites and Bias works hard to address the issue in ways that are challenging and accessible and to make the notion of a ”community” more complex than is usually found in politically correct materials.
The design of the book is poor and a book about human society without a single photograph is in itself an astonishing concept. The contempt for learners’ visual interests is compounded by the bad quality of the line drawings. The text runs across all the pages in a small font, in very long lines. There are double-page spreads of nothing but text.
Extensive use has been made of cartoon figures, either of real or imagined historical actors, or of a boy who utters informal comments on the text. In the entire book there are seven images of women in roles that include a teenage girl begging a boy for a Valentine’s card and a lady’s maid in Victorian England. South Africa is referred to as ”she”.
The best that can be said is that this book takes the formal requirements of the new curriculum very seriously. Section and activity headings signal required features and there can be no doubt in the mind of any selector that the book is designed to satisfy the letter of these requirements. Every chapter begins with the specific outcomes, phase organisers, programme organisers and assessment criteria set out in the language of the official curriculum documents. There is nothing at all learner-friendly about the style in which these sections are presented. They are there for teachers and selectors to read.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, June 15, 2000.
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