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Speaker 1: A proposed overall of the history curriculum is leading to

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Speaker 1: some pretty fierce debate. Their lots of questions around identity balance,

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Speaker 1: whether the country is equipping learners with the tools to

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Speaker 1: think critically about the past. The draft syllabus, which has

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Speaker 1: now been gazetted by the Basic Education Minister, shifts the

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Speaker 1: focus towards an African centered narrative, moving away largely, not completely,

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Speaker 1: but largely from traditionally taught topics like the French Revolution

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Speaker 1: and the US Civil Rights movement, in placing greater emphasis

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Speaker 1: on African empires, colonial encounters, and liberation struggles. Some people

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Speaker 1: have given it a double thumbs up, some people have

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Speaker 1: gone long and yes, maybe depends on how it is

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Speaker 1: taught and by whom and with what kind of resources.

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Speaker 1: And others, like my next guest, Professor Jonathan Jansen, professor

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Speaker 1: of education at Stellenbosch University, has been very critical. Jonathan

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Speaker 1: describes the new curriculum as anti intellectual and sold deadening

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Speaker 1: strong words Jonathan, good afternoon.

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Speaker 2: Good afternoon, trum.

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Speaker 1: So explain those strong words, that strong criticism.

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Speaker 2: Well, I was just listening to you now in the

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Speaker 2: run up to this interview, and I thought I should

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Speaker 2: say that Eastern curriculum might have been designed by whether

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Speaker 2: Man pete. I mean, it is such a load of nonsense,

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Speaker 2: you know. I grant you this that every country, the victors,

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Speaker 2: you know, give their version of history and the conquered,

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Speaker 2: of course, you know, rioting shame. This is true for

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Speaker 2: the white nationalists in the previous century, certainly true for

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Speaker 2: black nationalists now. And so I find this is this

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Speaker 2: curriculum is incredibly dumb on so many levels. But let

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Speaker 2: me just give you a practical reason why this thing

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Speaker 2: is not going to work. I've been working in a

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Speaker 2: schoolagh Bagno for two years in teaching as well as

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Speaker 2: a co leading and one of the things that's interesting

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Speaker 2: is that teachers are overwhelmed by the cat's curriculum being

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Speaker 2: content heavy. When a curriculum is content heavy, the primary

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Speaker 2: goal of a teacher is to cover the curriculum. In

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Speaker 2: otherwis just to get through all the content as quickly

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Speaker 2: as possible. Why because their promotions there regard depends on coverage.

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Speaker 2: But a historicallyctum that a skill space abother than content based,

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Speaker 2: you know, is one thing which they will debate. You know,

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Speaker 2: there will be excursions into other areas there would be

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Speaker 2: you know, quizzes and problems around how do I interpret

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Speaker 2: these particular events in your study. All of that is

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Speaker 2: squashed pedagogically by the fact that you have a content

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Speaker 2: heavy curriculum in which the primary preoccupation of the designers

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Speaker 2: is how can we put as much stuff into flat

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Speaker 2: The flip side of that is that ANDAMO and usually

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Speaker 2: took things out of it. So, for example, the civil

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Speaker 2: rights movement, okay in the United States, is taken out.

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Speaker 2: Why when so much of South African history in the

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Speaker 2: nineteen sistem seventies was influenced by and contributed to, for example,

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Speaker 2: think of black consciousness. Where did black consciousness come from?

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Speaker 2: Not from South Africa. Black consciousness come from leaders like

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Speaker 2: James Conats, the Seminary in New York, the Martin Luther King.

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Speaker 2: All of these people had a commendous influence on our thinking,

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Speaker 2: as we do around theirs. And so what these silly

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Speaker 2: people don't realize is that history is formed relationally. Okay,

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Speaker 2: So if you into this bad Europeans, Good Africans kind

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Speaker 2: of narrative, then of course you take out the financial evolution.

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Speaker 2: But you cannot understand constitutional democracy is today without understanding

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Speaker 2: differential evolution. So I don't know who these people that

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Speaker 2: designed the curriculumber. They were clearly as sleep at the wheel.

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Speaker 1: What one is looking for a balance between your history

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Speaker 1: and other people's history, so you can establish how your

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Speaker 1: history and their history interrelate.

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Speaker 2: That's right, and the balance is the wrong way you know,

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Speaker 2: used to do whether we call the internationalization in a

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Speaker 2: previous decade, on our globalization, you say, think about this.

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Speaker 2: For example, I'm paying more you know for petrol right

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Speaker 2: now because of an art inter man in Washington, DC.

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Speaker 2: In other words, there is a kind of inter relationship

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Speaker 2: between what happens in one part of the world and

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Speaker 2: what happens and another part of the world. So your starting

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Speaker 2: point as a curriculum theorist is how do things have

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Speaker 2: been related to each other? As opposed to the nineteen

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Speaker 2: sixties question, which was, you know, how do we become

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Speaker 2: African centered? And by the way, what took us thirty

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Speaker 2: years to decide. Our curriculum is not African center. Everything

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Speaker 2: I teach, by the way, is African centered, but it

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Speaker 2: is done in the relationship to what happens is Zambia,

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Speaker 2: or what happens in in Kenya, or what happens in

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Speaker 2: Latin Americans and so forth. So it is a foolishness,

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Speaker 2: political fullness, foolishness to talk about African centeredness in a

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Speaker 2: globalized world. And so I again I always say, insecure

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Speaker 2: in ourselves is just a related reaction to Rhodes must

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Speaker 2: fool that you suddenly, you know, get told we must

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Speaker 2: be African sentered. Now, this is, this is, this is

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Speaker 2: And by the way, notice we never have these debates

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Speaker 2: about the geographic carticular or the physics curriculum. We have

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Speaker 2: these debates about identity and the study of the past

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Speaker 2: when it comes to history. Now one more point. I

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Speaker 2: am about this the point of teaching history, and I

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Speaker 2: teach history to undergraduate first year as I used to

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Speaker 2: the point that history is to show how things in

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Speaker 2: the past, you know, show up in the present. So

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Speaker 2: thanks xenophobia. For example, do you think our attack on

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Speaker 2: other African news happens in a vacuum. It happens as

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Speaker 2: a result of the history of racially centralism, of including

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Speaker 2: and excluding. That is what I want our young people

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Speaker 2: to learn is you know, you know that famous Afroism,

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Speaker 2: the past is not dead and isn't even past, you know,

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Speaker 2: And so we don't have this intellectual sense of history.

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Speaker 2: They have a dumbing down of it. And that is

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Speaker 2: why in the non compulsory phase that is grades ten, eleven,

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Speaker 2: and twelve, every year there fewer and fewer students take

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Speaker 2: in history because we're boarding them to death.

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Speaker 1: One of one of the things which doesn't seem decided

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Speaker 1: yet Jonathan, in terms of the change of curriculum, is

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Speaker 1: the possibility of making it a compulsory subject. Again, in

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Speaker 1: those grades that you just point out, fewer and fewer

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Speaker 1: students are taking history. I think a lot of whatever

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Speaker 1: intellectual development has happened in my life was not largely

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Speaker 1: motivated by but a central guiding point was my study

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Speaker 1: of history. In my love of history. I was lucky

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Speaker 1: enough to have a good history teacher when I was

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Speaker 1: in those senior grades, and I cannot imagine thinking about

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Speaker 1: the world without a grounding in history.

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Speaker 2: I did history as well through metric and I can

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Speaker 2: tell you now it helped me enormously because of a

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Speaker 2: good teacher, right, It helped me enormously to understand the

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Speaker 2: present with this particular names on the past. So I

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Speaker 2: think it would be wonderful to have his study through to

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Speaker 2: get a twelve. But we don't have the teachers. The

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Speaker 2: curriculum doesn't teach itself. Okay, you need to have be

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Speaker 2: lucky like you and me to have our teachers who

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Speaker 2: could do a good expository lesson on Russian Revolution for example,

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Speaker 2: and show us the connections to the rise of the

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Speaker 2: Syracian Comnis Party. But that is a particular kind of

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Speaker 2: teacher that we don't have in the system. Right So,

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Speaker 2: but I also think there's a political reason why this

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Speaker 2: government will never make history compulsory in the senior phase.

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Speaker 2: In the ft there will be a revolt, I promise

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Speaker 2: you know it would be a revolt because this is

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Speaker 2: a patriotic history. It is not for you and I

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Speaker 2: regard as a good critical history.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, Jonathan. Always appreciate listening to you and

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Speaker 1: learning from you. Professor Jonathan Jansen is a professor in

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Speaker 1: education at Stellenbosch University