Teacher Preparation in South Africa

History, Policy and Future Directions

Linda Chisholm

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789738315
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Geschichte der Pädagogik

South Africa's transition to democracy has seen massive changes in the field of teacher education aimed at integrating its previously raced and gendered character. This book provides a comprehensive historical overview and relational understanding of the patterns of teacher preparation supporting South Africa's unequal formal education system. It shows how emerging patterns, policies and pedagogies were deeply entangled with the country's position within a broader international and colonial order as well as with dominant national political and economic social frameworks. Using rich archival and oral evidence, this book illuminates how successive policies restricted and enabled access to different institutions, while differentiated curricula prepared teachers to teach students intended to play different roles in a society marked by class, race and gender division. It explores the location and control of teacher provision for black and white teachers provided by mission societies and the state in colleges and universities. Post-apartheid governments sought to reverse entrenched racial legacies in education through closure of the colleges and incorporation of teacher preparation into universities, altered admission criteria and new curricula. These have resulted in new tensions which have arisen in relation to a world of competing pressures on universities and teachers. By shedding new light on these tensions from a historical perspective, this book will prove an invaluable resource for education leaders and researchers in the field of global and comparative education.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Early Forms of Teacher Preparation at the Cape

Historical precedents of contemporary forms of the preparation of teacher education lie not only in apartheid, but also in the origins of colonial and mission education in South Africa. Formal schooling, and therefore processes of teacher preparation, was a systematic feature of neither the countries colonising the Cape, nor the societies encountered and colonised. Informal teaching and learning by doing was a feature of all societies without formal schooling. However, European penetration of the south eastern tip of Africa did introduce the beginnings of formal schools, albeit controlled by the church and not the state, for which teachers were required. This chapter focuses on the beginnings of formal schooling and the nature of teachers and their preparation during the century and a half of Dutch East India Company rule when indigenous societies at the Cape were shattered and reshaped, and slavery was a distinct feature of Cape society. It was not until the early nineteenth century, when a far more radical colonialism under the British took over that expansion into the interior and along the coast occurred in a more sustained manner, often preceded, but certainly followed by initiatives to establish schools and import teachers. In this early period, schooling among both colonists and slaves was rudimentary and formal systems for teacher preparation non-existent.

This was a period when formal schooling was, however, beginning to be discussed and introduced in Europe by voluntary societies and the church. Malherbe, South Africa’s historian of the emergence of state-controlled schooling during the nineteenth century for whites in South Africa, shows that ideas and practices were in circulation simultaneously across colonial contexts and travelled vertically as well as horizontally. He writes about the ‘direct transplanting’ of the system as it prevailed in the Netherlands into the Cape while the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), also known as the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), was in charge.³⁹ Behr and MacMillan highlight the precedents in eighteenth-century Europe that might have set the backdrop for and influenced similar developments in South Africa: the introduction of ‘a measure of compulsory schooling […] in Prussia’ in 1763; the requirement in Holland that teachers undergo specialised training; the invention of the pupil-teacher system and establishment of a teacher training institution in 1797; the founding by Pestalozzi of a process in which teachers were prepared ‘in the art of teaching’,⁴⁰ and that provided the basis for the establishment of seminaries for teachers in Prussia and the German states and the establishment in France and Switzerland of state-controlled normal schools by 1835 and in England by 1839.⁴¹ The system in South Africa shared much but also differed significantly from these early European and American precedents. At this stage in South Africa, while these systems were coming into being in Europe, schooling and teacher education were still fairly elementary.

The ‘international’ aspect of teacher preparation in South Africa was present at its inception.⁴² More specifically, as Molteno argues, it was ‘introduced as part of the process whereby colonialism brought the subcontinent into the emergent world capitalist system’ and its ‘content and consequences were crucially conditioned by this order’, even if it was not always deliberately designed to promote it.⁴³ Yet South African scholarship has been little informed by more recent comparative work on how schooling systems became internationalised, changing their form and meaning in the course of their migration from one place to another during this period.⁴⁴ No work of this kind has been done on monitorial schools as a form of teacher training, which it was in Cape mission schools serving children of the Khoi and Griqua from 1813: here indeed it ‘was to be for many years the main source of supply of teachers’.⁴⁵ The preferred approach, when looking at teacher preparation, has been to document the acknowledged influences of particular models or countries on one another.⁴⁶

In order to understand how different international models and approaches to teacher preparation were disseminated and took root in South Africa and to appreciate why and how these developed in a racially differentiated and unequal manner, it is also important to situate them within the broader context of the evolving local South African economy and society. The model here is the unpublished work of Soudien et al.⁴⁷ If the purpose of Malherbe at the outset of the nineteenth century was to write a history that would show the ‘organic unity’ of white education, and that of later writers to fill in the forgotten and neglected history of black education, surely the purpose today, in a vastly changed context, is to write a history that illuminates the fractured dis/unity of the system that emerged for the preparation of both black and white teachers. In so doing this short chapter draws mainly on secondary sources and provides a re-interpretation of existing narratives. It shows how schooling under the Dutch East India company and early British rule resulted in a variety of paths into teaching: there was little formal instruction of teachers as we know it today, whether they were white or black.

Cape Economy, Society and Education During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Dominance of the Church

As Soudien et al point out, there had been ‘episodic’ contact between South Africans and Europeans in the shape of the Portuguese for some 150 years before the Dutch East India Company decided to open a refreshment station there in 1652. But what was significant about the society that evolved at the Cape was that neither the Europeans nor the Africans they encountered were an ‘undifferentiated, coherent and homogeneous group’.⁴⁸ Nor were schools the segregated institutions they became in a later period. Both government and mission schools were often mixed. And although the violence of slavery underpinned all social relations, the story of the emerging Cape society and relationships around education were not only ones of subordination: reading and writing, as Archie Dick shows, served many purposes and in some cases became tools for revolt.⁴⁹

On the European side of early Cape society were company officials, comprising religious and military personnel, as well as, after a grant of land to them in 1657, Free Burghers. In 1657, Europeans did not number more than 134 company employees. From the late seventeenth century, trekboers, who were semi-nomadic Dutch farmers and cattle grazers, settled ‘beyond the Cape’s official borders and out of the reach of the authority of the Company’.⁵⁰ On the African side were the Khoi Khoi and San hunters and herders, throughout this period engaged in both trading and raiding relationships with the newcomers. They were joined in 1658 by two shiploads of slaves, numbering about 234, the majority of whom were young boys and girls. Among the slaves, internal social divisions appeared, with some managing to improve their position relative to others, to the extent that ‘some even employed poor white people’.⁵¹ A century later, a census in 1754 revealed how small the community at the Cape was: it comprised only 510 colonists/settlers and 6,279 slaves. Soudien et al point out that whereas slaves were incorporated into Cape society ‘in a structured way, the Khoikhoi were effectively disorganised by the burgeoning economy and authority structures emerging around it’.⁵² By the late eighteenth century, expansion along the coast had led to the first clashes with Xhosa speakers across the Gamtoos River.

The first school in the Cape was accordingly a slave school, founded in 1658, there apparently not being much need for schooling among children of Company employees. However, as children of the latter increased in number, a school was opened in 1663. It included 17 children, of whom four were slaves, one a Khoikhoi child and the remaining 12 European children. In this and in other schools that gradually sprang up outside of Cape Town, Dutch and black children were taught ‘to read and learn their catechism’ on the same school benches and by the same teacher, the sick comforter, a religious appointee. A school at Stellenbosch in 1793, for example, included ‘forty or fifty members of the rising generation of all shades’.⁵³ From instructions issued in 1685, it is also clear that the curriculum did not differ for Khoi, slave and European children.⁵⁴ White and coloured children continued to be educated in the same schools for the next two centuries, until the end of the nineteenth century, although a class hierarchy gradually developed. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were coloured children in the schools for the children of the upper echelons of European society, and there were always whites in the poorer mission schools dominated by coloured children. Dick provides evidence that slaves and people of ‘mixed blood’ became teachers in the Slave Lodge in Cape Town, the Moravian Genadendal mission station at Baviaanskloof, Tuan Guru’s madrassah founded in 1793–1794 and in the open public schools.⁵⁵

Although the church played a leading role in the schools that emerged in Cape Town, Franschhoek and Stellenbosch, it was by no means a powerful force. As Malherbe argues, this was not surprising, given on the one hand that schooling was not yet a ‘state function’ in Holland either and on the other hand that the Dutch had no intention of founding a Dutch colony in South Africa.⁵⁶ The Dutch Church’s sick comforter, eventually replaced by a voorlezer, was supplemented in its activities by the Moravian mission station at Genadendal that had been founded by George Schmidt in 1737. Schmidt was forced to leave in 1744, but the mission station was later re-opened in 1791. The education provided was primarily religious, for the purpose of being able to read the Bible, recite prayers, know the Heidelberg catechism and qualify for confirmation.⁵⁷ This was the case in schools both in and around Cape Town and on the outlying trekboer farms, where a farmer might hire a meester (master) to drill the children for a few months in exchange for a bag of mealies.⁵⁸ These latter teachers were not church officials, however, but usually ex-servants (soldiers or sailors) of the company who possessed some of the rudiments of learning and who travelled from farm to farm.⁵⁹ This kind of teacher, sometimes working and teaching on a number of farms at the same time, was prevalent throughout the nineteenth century.⁶⁰

The teachers for these schools were not trained in any way: whether they were sick comforters assisting in the Sunday services, ministering to the sick and instructing youth, or whether they were itinerant former employees of the company or whether they were slaves or missionaries, few if any were formally prepared for the task. McKerron notes that ‘The standard of attainment expected of the teacher was not unduly high’, judging from a report of the Scholarch in 1792. Its requirements specified that:

A teacher should be a well-educated and refined man, trained for his work, thoroughly understanding spelling, be able to write a perfect hand, and to sing the Psalms in whatever key they may be sung […].He should also be no stranger to Italian bookkeeping for the benefit of those children who might afterwards enter a mercantile life. (He should understand) the French, English, or any other language […] be a member of the Dutch Reformed Church in order to be able to catechise his pupils at least twice weekly in preparation for confirmation […] be irreproachable (in conduct) and an example to his pupils […].

But even this standard was seldom attained, for it is stated that ‘[...] hardly one of them could write a decent hand, most of them spelt imperfectly and could in arithmetic hardly reach the Rule of Three […]’.⁶¹ It was only when the British took over the Cape from the Dutch in 1806 and as people moved further inland that schooling and teacher preparation came into focus.

Changing Relations at the Cape at the End of the Eighteenth Century up to 1834: Implications for Education

The Napoleonic wars, the rise of pietism and new expansionary and industrialising forces shaping Europe impacted dramatically on the Cape towards the end of the eighteenth century. In 1795, British forces landed at the Cape and in 1798 the Dutch East India Company was dissolved. For a brief period between 1803 and 1806, the Cape was returned to the Dutch under the Batavian Republic but finally in 1806 the British occupied the Cape for the second time and the Dutch surrendered power. The Cape Colony was formally ceded to Britain eight years later, in 1814, after Britain won the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon.

Between the announcement in 1807 of the intention and finally the formal abolition of slavery in 1834, regulations were put in place to regulate the use of Khoisan and coloured labour and to enable farmers to apprentice children of his labourers from the age of eight for a period of ten years. These were amended by Ordinance 50 in 1828, which required the consent of the parents. The effect was that when slavery was abolished, slaves were effectively indentured as apprentices and transformed into ‘free’ labour for farmers. However, these changes also strained master–slave relationships: many slaves deserted their owners, while others adopted a more rebellious stance.⁶² The arrival of the British and disruption of master–slave relationships resulted in what came to be known as the Great Trek, the movement of Dutch settlers into the interior. Their movement into the interior was facilitated by the Mfecane, a social process originating in the Natal coastal belt that had led on the one hand to new state formations and on the other to disrupted social polities that sought alliances with the Boers.

By this stage, however, a missionary revival in Europe had led to the arrival in South Africa of representatives from a number of different mission societies. The result was that by the middle of the century a network of mission stations was spread over a large part of the Cape and elsewhere in southern Africa.⁶³ In 1791, the Moravians re-established themselves at Genadendal in Baviaanskloof. They were followed in 1799 by the South African Missionary Society which started missions in Cape Town and country districts. Between 1799 and 1822 the London Missionary Society (LMS) founded mission stations at Zwartkop, Pacaltsdorp, Theopolis, Hankey on the Gamtoos River and among the Griqua. The Glasgow (later Free Scotland) Mission Society arrived in 1821, and had established Lovedale in the Eastern Cape by 1841. In 1829 the Paris Evangelical Society had set up shop in Basutoland and in 1830 the Lutheran Rhenish Mission began work in the Cedarberg and in the northwestern frontier with emancipated slaves. By the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Wesleyan Missionary Society had entered Namaqualand and established a chain of stations in the Ciskei, the Transkei and Tembuland: Wesleyville, Butterworth, Clarkebury, Buntingville, Mount Coke, Shawbury, Healdtown (near the present Fort Beaufort), Salem (near Grahamstown), and Lesseytown (near Queenstown). In 1834, the Berlin Mission Society had started mission work at Bethany among the Korannas and Buchana. In 1836, the American Board Mission had come to Natal. ⁶⁴ The Hermannsburg Mission Society arrived in Natal in 1854.

In the first quarter of the century, the new Colonial government exercised little authority over the activities of these missions, but attempted to advance education in existing schools in the Cape through the Colonial Secretary and the Governor, who was the chief administrator of all matters pertaining to education and who promulgated all Ordinances and Regulations. The Governor acted independently of the Bible and School Commission, which exercised formal but no real authority over schools, with respect to higher education and the English Free Schools. The latter was a system introduced in 1813 by Governor Cradock on lines similar to the English monitorial schools of Lancaster and Bell. (see Chapter Two for further discussion) These free schools lasted until about 1834.⁶⁵ Free schools functioned under a local committee, used English as a medium of instruction and the monitorial systems of Bell and Lancaster which also ‘found favour in the mission schools’: there is evidence of the system in use at the Zuurbraak station of the LMS in 1813 and again at Griquatown in 1819.⁶⁶ The chief characteristic of monitorial schools was the use of older students as teachers.

The practice of importing teachers from England and Scotland, and sending them to Uitenhage, Graaff Reinet, Stellenbosch, George, Tulbagh, Caledon, Swellendam, and Paarl that was started at the end of the eighteenth century continued for the greater part of the century.⁶⁷ Although the Batavian Republic’s de Mist had put forward plans for the training of teachers in 1804, ‘these never materialised’.⁶⁸ In practice, ‘the Government schools were staffed by imported teachers who used the older pupils, known as monitors, to help with the younger ones’.⁶⁹

In the mission schools, training was informal and oriented to missionaries’ religious and ‘civilisational’ purposes. Behr informs us that ‘many of the missionaries trained their own evangelists and teachers to help them in their work’. One such was Barnabus Shaw, who laboured among the Namaquas at Leliefontein. Three of his protégés included Jacob Links, a ‘close relation of a chief’, Andries Orang and Eve Bartels. Links was ‘employed as a schoolmaster and assistant missionary for several years’, eventually finding his death by a poisoned arrow across the Great Gariep or Great Orange River in Great Namaqualand’.⁷⁰ Teachers and teaching was mainly a male activity, but female teachers were employed for the teaching of young girls.

The first training school for teachers was established at the Moravian mission station, Genadendal, in 1838. Eventually the Genadendal Training Institution had to close its doors in favour of the Rhenish Training School for teachers at Worcester. By this stage, however, no fewer than 236 teachers had qualified and passed their final examinations at Genadendal.⁷¹ Behr observes that one of the many teachers trained at Genadendal by the Rev Hallbeck, Superintendent of the Moravian Missions in the Cape at the time, was one Ezekiel Pfeiffer, a surname that reappears in the founding of the Teachers’ League of South Africa in 1913.⁷²

Relative to the time:

the students at Genadendal were given a training stretching over a period of six years. Students were admitted to the training course after std. IV. The fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Conclusion
• References
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: List of Colleges, 1838–1990
• Appendix 2: List of Colleges at the End of the 1990s
• Index