Abstract
In South Africa, the notion of an African Philosophy of Education emerged with the advent of post-apartheid education and the call for an educational philosophy that would reflect this renewal, a focus on Africa and its cultures, identities and values, and the new imperatives for education in a postcolonial and post-apartheid era. The idea of an African Philosophy of Education has been much debated in South Africa. Not only its content and purpose but also its very possibility have been, and continue to be, the subject of understandably passionate exchanges. In this paper, after discussing some of the constitutive features of African Philosophy of Education, we indicate aspects with which we are sympathetic. Our central question is whether African Philosophy of Education is the revisioned, ‘typically African’ philosophy of education that it is claimed to be. We argue that it has revealed certain tendencies that are remarkably similar to characteristics of Fundamental Pedagogics, the repressive doctrine complicit in apartheid education that it claims to replace. More substantially still (and this is a feature that has wider ramifications for philosophy of education internationally), African Philosophy of Education, by labeling itself uniquely and distinctly ‘African’, runs the risk of insulating itself not only from interaction with the wider (i.e. non-African) world but also from any critical interrogation.
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Notes
This is a direction associated, for example, with the writings of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paulin J. Hountondji, Peter Bodunrin and Kwasi Wiredu. Although both Henry Odera Oruka and Kwame Gyekye can be credited with recording, concurrently and independently from one another, contemporary non-academic intellectual traditions (Lölke 2001, p. 140), Oruka was the first, in 1978 (Oruka 2002), to undertake this classification. He has recently (Oruka 1998, pp. 101, 102) described two additional types of philosophy, the hermeneutic trend and the artistic or literary trend—somewhat unhelpfully, because the former appears to be subsumed by critical or ‘professional’ philosophy, while the latter contains elements of the other trends identified previously, ethnophilosophy, sage philosophy and nationalist-ideological philosophy. See also Le Grange 2005, pp. 128ff; Waghid, passim.
Fundamental Pedagogics cast itself as a discipline that used ‘the scientific method’ and, by virtue of this, as the only authentic method for studying education. By deploying ‘the phenomenological method’ the Fundamental Pedagogician was supposedly able to acquire an understanding of the phenomenon of education by means of ‘radical reflection’ on the education situation, which would then be described in terms of a set of pedagogic categories and corresponding criteria. Within this approach, etymology was given a philosophically fundamental, legitimising function (see Du Plooy et al. 1982, esp. chapter 1; De Jager et al. 1985, again esp. chapter 1; see also Luthuli 1981, pp. 8, 9). Leading Fundamental Pedagogicians (e.g. Landman and Gous 1969) described their science as free of metaphysical assumptions. Yet, in the practice of education,
accompanying the child on the way to self-realisation … must be in accordance with the demands of the community and in compliance with the philosophy of life of the group to which he belongs. In this way the South African child has to be educated according to Christian National principles. (Viljoen and Pienaar 1971, p. 19; emphasis ours)
Fundamental Pedagogics was criticized and roundly rejected by many involved in conceptualizing a new educational order after apartheid, not only because of its obvious endorsement of segregation and the racist elements of the Christian National doctrine, and its adherence to theocentric (Christian) truth and values, but also for its authoritarian (and androcentric) conception of the child (Enslin 1992).
See, for example, J.L. Du Plooy, G.J. Griessel and M.O. Oberholzer:
Pedagogics has been enabled to inhabit its own home, maintain its identity de facto-ly and de juris-ly. The term and concept de juris gives rise to a discussion of the autonomy of pedagogics. …Pedagogics as a “child” of philosophy has become … an independent science in its own house in which those practicing it—pedagogicians or educationists—have jurisdiction to do so. It is entitled to legislate for itself. (Du Plooy et al. 1982, p. 209)
A noteworthy example in this regard is found in a recent article by Michael B. Adeyemi and Augustus A. Adeyinka, whose analysis of the concept of education, and its implications (Adeyemi and Adeyinka 2003, pp. 426, 427), closely mirrors that given by fundamental pedagogicians (Luthuli 1981, pp. 8, 9; Du Plooy et al. 1982, pp. 2, 3; De Jager et al. 1985, p. 9).
A striking parallel to Ramose’s exposition here exists in Fundamental Pedagogics theory:
Only man “exists”. This does not suggest that there is nothing else but man, but that man exhibits a mode of existence (mode of being) which sets him aside from all everything else which is …Existence is a mode of being which is characteristic of man and which constitutes him as a human being. This implies that existence indicates the humanness of man. The same basic idea is to be found in the category “Dasein”. In the category Dasein there is already reference to what is further explained by the category existence. The idea of being present is embedded in the prefix “Da”. Man is, therefore, not an isolated being. (De Jager et al. 1985, p. 151)
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We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for engaging with this paper and offering helpful feedback and, especially, to the editor for his comprehensive, detailed and sympathetic suggestions.
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Horsthemke, K., Enslin, P. African Philosophy of Education: The Price of Unchallengeability. Stud Philos Educ 28, 209–222 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9106-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-008-9106-2