Education in Apartheid South Africa: Propaganda with a Purpose

That is, I would argue that all governments use public education as a vehicle for propaganda that "socializes" children into certain mindsets, behaviors, and expectations so that they can become model citizens in the society that produced them. Public education's fundamental advantage of creating a model citizen is also one of its major drawbacks-at least in the eyes of those who believe the government's set of values is harmful (e.g., apartheid) or in the eyes of those of us who believe education's purpose is to teach children to think for themselves.

In other words, even if you agree with the value system taught to children in the school system, should children be spoon-fed a set of ideas upon which to base their lives? Truth may be an anti-dote to some propaganda, but some propaganda can also be true; purpose and intent-not truth-are at question here.

Whether you look at the education system as a womb protecting and creating future citizens or as a laboratory developing clones depends partly, perhaps, on how much you agree with the values propagated within that system. This is surely one major reason why so many South Africans have, in recent years, started teaching their own children: educational benefits aside, it allows parents to control the lessons and ideas their children receive so that they are instilling values and shaping their children's characters, rather than the State.

Homeschooling has the potential to be a radical reversal of the school system but it usually falls far short of that goal. In fact, parents often end up doing the same thing as the public school system-breeding children who view the world through a particular lens. It just happens that the lens given to them is the lens their parents wish, rather than the State.1

Homeschool in South Africa may be post-apartheid's version of the "school boycott," and it may turn out to be just as political. Boycotting school ultimately produced few changes to education, though it had an enormous effect on African children who never returned to school. But the movement for black resistance in South Africa was under girded by a vast system of "political education," called "conscientization." If you received the slogans and political opinions of the movement, and became an active participant in the liberation struggle, you were "conscientized."

Again, my point is that this is no different than the political education the schoolchildren learned in school,

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