Conclusion
The South African obsession with performance-based pedagogies, as I have shown, has negative implications for resolving equity problems in educational reforms; it threatens to negate a political debate about ‘goals’ in favour of a technician’s debate about ‘ends’; and it fragments knowledge into meaningless tasks that assign value to external behaviours rather than the multiplicity of ways in which learning and valuing can be experienced (if not always expressed). The real danger to building a strong democratic culture through education is that what should be vibrant debates about ‘what’s worth knowing’ could be effectively silenced in a performance assessment system that only values, through a complex assessment system, that which is worth doing. Such an understanding of education is, unfortunately, entrenched in a global network of economic and technological processes that make such pursuits appear both normal and inevitable.
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Original language: English
His two most recent books areChanging curriculum: studies on outcomes based education in South Africa (with Pam Christie) andImplementing education policy: the South African experience (with Yusuf Sayed). Professor Jansen was a high-school science teacher, educational consultant, academic administrator and policy researcher with various institutions including the University of Durban Westville, Creative Associates International (Washington, DC) and the United Nations. He contributes to and serves in various editorship roles for theInternational journal of qualitative studies in education, theJournal of science, Perspectives in education, and theJournal of inservice education.
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Jansen, J.D. On the politics of performance in South African education: Autonomy, accountability and assessment. Prospects 31, 553–564 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03220039
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03220039