The HSRC is pleased to invite you to the launch of A New History of Formal Schooling in South Africa 1658-1910: An education of Contradictions, on the 6th of March 2025 in Cape Town. This book presents the first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.
The book attempts to show how education is conceptualised, mobilised, and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.
A New History of South African Schooling in South Africa looks at schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, the book offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately tells the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e. Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling that the text seeks to emphasise cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically, and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.
Date: 6 March 2025
Time: 18:00 for 18:30
Venue: Exclusive Books, Waterfront, Cape Town
Register to attend: skhan@hsrc.ac.za