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Class and Color in South African Youth Policy: The Witwatersrand, 1886–1910

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Linda Chisholm
Linda Chisholm*
Affiliation:
Department of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Extract

During the last two decades the material and ideological processes by which schooling has assisted in the formation and reproduction of classes have formed an important theme in a burgeoning historical and sociological literature on the relationship between schooling and capitalism. In South Africa these structures and processes of schooling and socialization have differed from those elsewhere in that they have contributed to the reproduction of classes that are broadly racially defined. It is usual to trace the origins of apartheid education to the introduction of Bantu education. This article will show that the introduction of a racially divided system of education, playing its part in shaping a dispossessed and exploited black working class and a privileged and racist white ruling bloc, long predates the introduction of the Bantu Education Act of 1953. It is rooted in the pattern and dynamics of the particular form of South African capital accumulation, specifically the rapid growth and expansion of the gold-mining industry after 1886.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. The former usage is preferred as it is more inclusive of the participation of blacks in the war. As Warwick has pointed out in Warwick, Peter, ed., The South African War: The Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902 (London, 1980), 8: “A remarkable feature of the historiography of the South African war is the way in which the involvement of black South Africans has been ‘written out’ of accounts of the conflict.”Google Scholar

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