Covid-19 pandemic and the prospects of education in South Africa
- PDF / 474,700 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 2 Downloads / 191 Views
Covid‑19 pandemic and the prospects of education in South Africa Lesley Le Grange1
Accepted: 23 September 2020 © UNESCO IBE 2020
Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic has caused havoc in the world, radically changing our lives and raising new and old questions, both existential and educational. This pandemic has revealed the underbelly of South African society in general and its education system more specifically—it has laid bare the gross inequalities that are the legacies of apartheid and the consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on ideas articulated in the four introductory chapters of the International Handbook of Curriculum Research, edited by William Pinar in 2014, this article discusses Covid-19 and the prospects of education in South Africa. The article shows how understanding the wisdom of indigenous traditions along with the moral dimensions of education, race, and the new technologies of surveillance, neoliberalism, and education can provide a nuanced awareness of the nature of the Covid-19 pandemic. It then explores the implications of such insights for the field of curriculum studies and, where relevant, for the school curriculum. It concludes by showing how these broad themes intersect and gel around the notion of Ubuntu-currere. Keywords Covid-19 · Ethics · Neoliberalism · New technologies · Racism · Ubuntucurrere
The Covid-19 pandemic has radically changed human lives across the globe. The pandemic has manifested as a multifaceted crisis: health systems of many countries have been found wanting, resulting in deaths; the global economy has plummeted into recession; governments have curtailed freedoms of citizens; and communities have closed schools and higher education institutions during lockdown periods. As a society, we often raise critical questions in times of crises—old questions and new ones. Asking the perennial existential question of how we ought to live is apposite at this
* Lesley Le Grange [email protected] 1
Department of Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland, Stellenbosch 7602, South Africa
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
L. Le Grange
time. And also, the enduring curriculum question, first raised by Herbert Spencer (1884): What knowledge is of most worth? Other education questions that we could invoke are: How ought we to teach/learn? What are the prospects for education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic? What is education for in troubled times? Is knowledge enough? We are witnessing emerging responses to these questions, and I shall touch on these questions in various ways in this article. For the most recent International Handbook of Curriculum Research, Pinar (2014) commissioned four introductory chapters to challenge accounts on curriculum studies presented by authors from different nations. In the first chapter, Autio (2014) highlights the moral dimension of education and makes the point that it is education’s implicit morality that makes it educative. Autio’s use of “morality” is not meant in a didactive sense but is
Data Loading...
