Is Education fueling ignorance in the Black middle class?

Education is the key to success, so said our old Nelson in a speech somewhere one day. We all gulped that up, well our parents did, and by default education became the dangled carrot that all “blacks” must choke on or all hell would break loose.

But the type of education, the source and the delivery got muffled in the meaning. Our parents didn’t think about this because after 1994, the epitome of progress for the middle class was “white assimilation” and European cultural adoption.

Historically European based education

As a British colony, it only makes sense that the brits would introduce education that would benefit their cause. You would recall that textbooks have historically had “white” authors, published by European publishing companies, and have to an extent distorted a lot of the African history. We have all learnt about the 1652 invasion of South Africa but have never fully known where and how it all began. Only later in our lives, due to being politicized, have we made the effort to dig deeper and get more knowledge.

This education methodology was always to Europeanize “natives” as this would render them “included” in the European culture, and disempower them from organizing uprisings, making any type of decolonial demands or wanting to be completely separated from the commonwealth.

Here’s a short timeline of how your “precious key to success” came about:

1798 – Joseph Lancaster starts his method of education (monitorial system) for working class children in England. This system will later be used in South Africa.

1799 – The first school specifically for Africans opens near what is now King William’s Town. Before this only a handful of Khoi and black South Africans received formal education.

1800 – Christian missionaries establish schools for Africans, on the fringes of settler occupation.

1804 – The School Ordinance is passed. This is a milestone in the history of education because it withdrew the control of public education from the church and introduced the idea that the organization of public schooling is a responsibility of the state.

ALSO READ: Four private colleges deregistered by Higher Education Department.

1822 – 1824 – Government Free Schools (also known as English Free Schools) are established throughout the Cape Colony. A school is established at Wynberg and is the forerunner of the Wynberg Boys’ Schools. Based on Lancaster’s monitorial system, the schools are mostly aimed at the poor. Instruction is exclusively in English and at no charge to the parents. Free schools are originally intended to be multiracial, but soon they begin to provide for white children only.

1824 – The famous mission station, Lovedale, is founded by the Glasgow Missionary Society near present-day Alice in the Eastern Cape.

1839 (1822-1839) – The number and quality of Dutch private schools increases by more than double to protest the English school system, which is inferior by the colonists. The Cape’s strong tradition of private schools can be traced back to this time.

1839 – A Department of Education is established in the Cape Colony. All mission schools now fall under its control.

1859 (1848-1859) – Higher education is offered by the South African College, the Diocesan College in Rondebosch, the Theological Seminary at Stellenbosch, St Andrew’s in Grahamstown, and the Grey Institute in Port Elizabeth.

Rooted in Coloniality, never transformed

The irony of having a “black” woman under the Basic Education ministry, who however is a member of the Democratic Alliance, which was previously the New National Party, previously the National Party that brought the Apartheid system in South Africa – is not only that she is black, but that she has fully embodied the “educational ignorance” that has been borne out of the post 1994 multi-racial schooling system …..which the Middle Class has used as a yardstick to determine success or prosperity.

The distinction between public and private schooling has been kept in-order to maintain inequality and class divisions. The inability to introduce indigenous languages (as a bare minimum) into the schooling system – as mediums of instruction – in black school (mainly), the lack of South African rooted cultural education and history, has also been a way to maintain the European educational status quo.

The real “middle -class” product minister – Siwiwe Gwarube grew up in KwaMdingi, a village outside King Williams Town in the former Cape province. She was raised by her grandmother, who was an unmarried teacher. After matriculating at the Kingsridge High School for Girls in King William’s Town, she studied law, politics, and philosophy at Rhodes University in Grahamstown [Wikipedia].

We are not educated to poke holes in the norm, but rather to accept and replicate the norm

My quite simple wind up is that we attain an education to fit into the norm. We don’t question, we don’t poke holes, we don’t reject – we just wholeheartedly accept what we have been given as the “best education” in South Africa.

Perhaps this is why a political organization that is rooted in Apartheid and colonialism is now making the moves in our political space. It’s why we have so many black politicians starting their own political partis to defend whiteness, promote black ignorance and attack black unity. It is why a large majority of South Africans fell for the covid-19 lie and went in heaps to get vaccinated.

Perhaps this is why we continue to hate each other based on race, economic, cultural, traditional and language backgrounds; why women still find their beauty in westernized standards and why children today are raised in English.

Ours is not to assimilate to Africanness, independent thinking and creation of new narratives but rather to fit into what already exists. Our precious education has jailed us and removed any potential for any of us to think.

~ Written by Thandwa Dlamini, Simply Extraordinary Blog on X and Substack.