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Owning Up

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Learning with Damaged Colonial Places

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Abstract

In the post-post-apartheid period, when the reality of on-going and increasing inequality became unmistakeable, a common sentiment was: ‘At least under apartheid, we knew who the enemy was!’. Sadly, the opposite is true. The achievement of a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist society came at the expense of on-going participation in the heavily skewed global capitalist market system. The obvious travesty of a white minority government was gone, but the extraction continued: extraction at the expense of the required investment in social infrastructure. Persistent inequalities and desperate contestations over resources have an impact on the troubled world of the crèche community. This is the focus of this chapter.

Who designs the entrance exam for humanity?

Gert Biesta, 1998, p. 11

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed,

Everybody knows that the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost,

Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich,

That’s how it goes, everybody knows.

Leonard Cohen, 1988

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Entitled, An interpretive analysis of the early childhood development policy trajectory on post-Apartheid South Africa, it is accessible on the University of Stellenbosch portal at: http://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/105968.

  2. 2.

    The Council for Higher Education envisages the work of South African universities and academics as having three components: Research, teaching and community engagement http://www.che.ac.za/sites/default/files/publications/Kagisano_No_6_January2010.pdf.

  3. 3.

    Soweto (the name being an abbreviation of South Western Township) is the oldest township of Johannesburg, established in 1930 under the Apartheid Urban Areas Act of 1923 designed to separate ‘black’ people from ‘white’. See www.sahistory.org.za.

  4. 4.

    Translanguaging is a theoretical position in language studies that disrupts notions of discrete, fixed and bounded languages used independently. Translanguaging acknowledges the porosity of language and the emergent and complex subjectivities produced through access to multiple, dynamic and mutually affecting language resources (see, for example, Makalela 2014).

  5. 5.

    Apart from the dedicated arts NGOs mentioned in my introduction, The Project for the Study of Alternative Education (PRAESA) is an example of an NGO that does important work in promoting reading and multi-modal and philosophical storyplay in all languages, inspired by Sara Stanley.

  6. 6.

    Teachers in the Reggio Emilia system never work as individual teachers: Malaguzzi sees ‘team’ teaching (always more than one adult with any group of children) as a safeguard against the ‘inhuman’ and ‘individualistic’ tendencies that can take hold when adults are alone with thirty children (Malaguzzi 2016, p. 223).

  7. 7.

    Mindboggles is the name given to the P4C network that Karin Murris established in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. Teachers are invited to become a part of a community of philosophical enquiry and meet monthly to practice.

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  1. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Theresa Magdalen Giorza

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  1. Theresa Magdalen Giorza
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Giorza, T.M. (2021). Owning Up. In: Learning with Damaged Colonial Places. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_2

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