Confucian Education

Abstract

From the genesis of European and Asian immigration to southern Africa three and a half centuries ago, cultural and racial division has increasingly characterized every dimension of its society. Education became a key mechanism utilized by the authorities to maintain separation and differentiation between the indigenous, colonial and various immigrant communities, and thereby also upheld the white minority’s dominant and privileged position. By the mid-twentieth century, government segregation and apartheid policies were reflected and ultimately entrenched within the education system. In essence, the official minority white government education system was a dominant factor that, on the one hand, kept the various cultural communities divided from each other from without, but, at the same time, maintained a degree of cultural community cohesion from within. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, post-apartheid South Africa continues to grapple with the legacy of this divided and unequal education system, while the question of a multi-cultural equitable education system remains paramount.