Inclusiveness and participation in discourses of educational governance in South Africa

Abstract

The abolition of apartheid has, for the first time, made it possible for South Africa to enter into discourses of inclusiveness on all levels of society: constitutionally, legislatively and in terms of policies and processes of implementation. Given the white supremacist and exclu‐sivist nature of apertheid, current transformation processes are explicitly aimed at redressing the imbalances and inequities caused by apartheid iself. The new Constitution of the Republic of South Africa is a clear testimony to this. Given the inclusiveness of the new Constitution, current legislations, policies and mechanisms of and for implementation attempt to realize such inclusiveness in the actual lives of all South Africans, across all social spheres. This paper focuses particularly on the educational sphere and analyses the extent to which the recently (1996) adopted South African Schools Act (SASA) is inclusive, how it frames inclusiveness and problems and prospects within it. Using SASA as the basis for our discussion, we argue that inclusiveness is inextricably tied to discourses about democracy, which privilege the notion of participation, through which it is assumed inclusiveness will be achieved in ways that are considered to be appropriate. We demonstrate that rather than actually realizing the full extent of inclusiveness made possible by the new Constitution, SASA circumscribes such inclusiveness in ways that may potentially marginalize the historically marginalized in South Africa (inter alia, black, working‐class and rural people), and rather than redressing past inequities, may perpetuate and further exacerbate them.