International Yearbook of History Education

A. Dickinson, P. Gordon, P. Lee, J. Slater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136895814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This international academic and professional yearbook contains articles and reviews on matters of interest to all concerned with history in education from contributors throughout the world. The yearbook will encourage rigorous exploration or philosophical, psychological, sociological and historical perspectives upon history in education and their relation to practice where appropriate. The theme of the first edition is centralisation and decentralisation of national curricula.

1
Distortions of Discourse: Some Problematical Issues in the Restructuring of History Education in South African Schools¹

GREG CUTHBERTSON AND ALBERT GRUNDLINGH

Introduction

The seemingly seismographical political shifts in South African society have given rise to much literature claiming to provide insights into the dynamics and direction of present events. Some is of the crystal ball variety; some attempts a much more serious analysis. The past, too, has come under review; this chapter is concerned with the teaching of history in the 1990s in a society which is in the process of political transformation. While we are critical of some of the latest ‘official’ literature on history education, we are fully aware of the many pitfalls and problems involved in the restructuring process, not least those associated with race, class, gender and the nature of academe. Such disclaimers notwithstanding, there seems to us to be a need to discuss the distortions of the international discourse on ‘nation-building’, ‘group identity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ currently used in the debate about refashioning the history curriculum in schools.

Our argument is not that these concepts are irrelevant or anachronistic - on the contrary, they are most germane to history education. What we wish to emphasize is that to realize their potential as lodestars in redesigning syllabuses, they have to be deployed with greater precision and a finer awareness of the particular role for which they were designed. There is a real problem in the uncritical and mechanical transfer of a discourse which emanates from relatively stable and democratic western countries to the turbulent and politically volatile South African setting. While international debates are obviously of value in arriving at a more comprehensive assessment of the South African situation, its peculiarities do not easily fit the mould shaped by the concerns and circumstances of others.

In evaluating ‘multiculturalism’, ‘nation building’ and ‘group identity’, it is also important to view them as part of a wider discourse in South Africa, one which deals with issues like curriculum reform, the production of history, the notion of neutrality and problems of content. For a more complete understanding of the problematic nature of restructuring history education, these aspects also have to be disentangled.

Curriculum Reform

School and university history curricula are under scrutiny in many parts of the world. In the United Kingdom, the work of the National Curriculum History Working Group has led to a welter of reaction for and against a new history syllabus which seeks to restore the popularity of the subject, and to promote national pride and patriotism.² In the United States of America (USA), historians have also tried to stem the decline in history enrolments at schools and universities since the 1970s; the Bradley Report is indicative of American curriculum reform.³ European scholars complain that history is in crisis because it has lost its social function.⁴ Teachers in New Zealand have resorted to an elaborate advertising programme to propagate the value of history in high schools after a dramatic decline in the number of history pupils in high schools during the 1980s.⁵ Curriculum reform in Australia has elicited the involvement of the Royal Australian Historical Society in challenging the Green Paper of the New South Wales Education Ministry, published at the end of 1988, which gave science and technology pride of place at the expense of history and the other humanities. The Green Paper proposed that history be part of a broader multi-disciplinary ‘Australian Studies’.⁶

In Africa there has been soul-searching about the nature of history teaching in schools in the post-colonial era. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) held a conference on history textbooks in African schools in Nairobi in April 1989. At this symposium it appeared that only Zimbabwe and Mozambique had tried to introduce some of the content and approaches of ‘people’s history’ into the curriculum. For the rest, African history courses looked remarkably similar to those at the time of independence in the 1960s. Andre Proctor, in ‘Towards a New History Curriculum: some observations on the African and Zimbabwean experiences’, has noted that ‘in almost all of independent Africa a people’s history which can challenge the dominant Africanist/Nationalist approach hardly exists’.⁷ In this article Proctor provides a detailed case-study of curriculum design in Zimbabwe in which he identifies the weaknesses of a history syllabus which was hastily drawn up to promote the new ‘socialist’ state inaugurated by Robert Mugabe. He cites the role of outmoded textbooks in retarding the important methodological and conceptual advances intended by the syllabus; the incompatibility of colonial-style teaching and a progressive, skills-approach history curriculum; the disjunction between history textbooks and collective memory which impinges on how people see history, on how history relates to their lives and how public events are linked to their own personal experiences; and the lack of enthusiasm for history among pupils.⁸

In South Africa, historians have consistently carped about declining numbers at residential universities, especially Afrikaans-medium institutions, and also the waning interest in school history among white children. This, of course, ignores the enormous growth in history enrolments at the Universities of the Western Cape and South Africa and the sustained interest in history in black schools. There may, of course, be structural reasons for these trends, such as a paucity of science and mathematics teachers in the Department of Education and Training (DET). Much has been written recently about the ‘appetite for the past’ which is supposed to be a feature of the political struggle against apartheid oppression. This apparent demand for history - which is difficult to gauge with any certainty - is probably the result of an apartheid version of the past which has starved black South Africans intellectually. Colin Bundy suggests that the popularity of history at secondary and tertiary levels is directly related to the political dislocation, economic stagnation and the spiral of violence since the 1970s.⁹ There is also a sense in which history is seen as a useful political training ground for a future generation of black bureaucrats and careerists.

Approaches to History

History is likely to become relevant to many pupils and students if it begins to ‘peel the [prevailing] myths off South African history’.¹⁰ The contempt for the history offered at school and the need to redress its distortions has led to a clamour for historians to deliver a different past. This has placed palpable pressure on some historians to confess their political culpability in producing a past which legitimated domination, and on others to uncover a repressed version of the past which was previously denied to so many South Africans. So far we have had a few significant confessions, but they have not necessarily led to a paradigm conversion which goes beyond mimicking government reforms.¹¹ More important is the rewriting of representative South African history in accessible form which, despite certain shortcomings, has been given impetus by the path-breaking Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa (1988 and 1989)¹² and John Pampallis’s smaller-scale The Foundations of a new South Africa (1991).¹³

Attempts to create a new school history curriculum and to produce new textbooks are necessarily a response to the various productions of history which have competed for hegemony in South Africa, and the way in which the past is represented has to some degree mirrored and reinforced the relations of dominance in this society. Bundy has identified the main representations: white supremacist history; apartheid history or history by segregation; and anti-apartheid history or history by assertion. These versions of the past have respectively denied blacks a place in history except as ‘external irritants’, allocated them their ‘own’ history, or exaggerated African agency, initiative and identity in order to construct a ‘black history’.¹⁴

The production of history cannot be separated from the way in which the tightly controlled DET syllabus interacts with the textbook market. The main concern of publishers is to break into the lucrative DET market with high volume sales. In order to do so textbooks have to conform to the letter of a heavily prescribed syllabus. A dissenting text therefore stands little chance of being prescribed, and even manuscripts which use whatever limited room there is for ‘creative manoeuvring’ are likely to be rejected.¹⁵ These obstacles, however, have not prevented certain enterprising authors and publishers from producing textbooks which disregard state-controlled syllabuses.¹⁶ Depending upon the future politics of the market-place and the politics of the classroom, some of these books have the potential to inaugurate a new era of school history in the 1990s.

It would, however, be wrong to assume that apartheid history is static. In the course of many revisions, it has become more sophisticated and has also changed its shape in keeping with the constitutional machinations of the government since the advent of tricameralism. In the DET syllabus, for instance, there has been a move during the 1980s towards a retribalization of the past, the establishment of a new ethnic idyll in which black heroic figures are invoked to legitimize separate development. Thus Shaka, instead of Verwoerd, is depicted as the original ‘creator’ of the ‘homelands’. Similarly, the exploitation and resistance of the ‘Coloureds’ are glossed over in favour of an approach which emphasizes their ‘positive’ contribution to white South Africa - an interpretation which is congruent with their envisaged role as junior partners in government.

But the problem is much wider. Some renderings of anti-apartheid history, although they portray blacks as the makers of their own past rather than victims of a white history, are conceptually trapped in the apartheid history paradigm by virtue of the primacy it gives to ‘race’ as an analytical tool. They also over-romanticize ‘the black experience’, especially in its representation of a golden pre-colonial era. Moreover, they are inclined to project an unproblematical view of the liberation struggle which glosses over class divisions and gender issues.¹⁷ The effect of this has been to diminish the value of other nuanced anti-apartheid histories whose revisionist perspectives have added to, rather than subtracted from, the complexity of South Africa’s past; most of them have tried to avoid crude oversimplification.

The Notion of Neutrality

In answer to such constructions of the past, some historians and teachers of history have evoked notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ to produce among other things a new consensus history.¹⁸ The objectivity debate has received a fillip from Peter Novick’s influential book, That Noble Dream (1988), which is partly a response to the challenge of post-modernism and partly an assessment of American historical endeavour. What is clear from his work is that historical objectivity is not a single idea, but a vast and diverse array of attitudes and assumptions, and that it is therefore crucial to ground objectivity in social mechanisms of criticism and evaluation rather than in the qualities of individual historians. In South Africa objectivity, enshrined in ‘scientific’ history, has been used in several functional ways, not unrelated to the demands of Afrikaner politics and the pursuit of middle-class professionalism.¹⁹

Directly related to the idea of objectivity is the notion of neutrality. Recently it has been assumed that by commissioning the Huma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editorial
• 1. Distortions of Discourse: Some Problematical Issues in the Restructuring of History Education in South African Schools
• 2. Government Control of Secondary History Syllabuses and Textbooks in Spain
• 3. History Teaching in Spain: The Challenge of a New Curriculum
• 4. History and the National Curriculum in England
• 5. Change and Continuity: History Teaching in the People’s Republic of China
• 6. Clio Throws Away the Uniform: History Education in Transition in Estonia and Eastern Germany 1989–90
• 7. A Decentralized National Curriculum: Denmark
• 8. Designing a New Syllabus in History for Schools in New South Wales, Australia
• 9. History Teaching in the New Europe: Challenges, Problems and Opportunities A commentary on a symposium organized by the Council of Europe, Bruges, December 1991
• 10. Methodologies of Textbook Analysis A report on an educational research workshop of history and social studies, Braunschweig, Germany
• 11. History and Economic Awareness: Theory and Empirical Test
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index