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ABSTRACT
In many countries, the contours of skills formation systems are traced back to early struggles over control of apprenticeship. This paper uses a curriculum lens to examine two distinctive policy moments in the history of formal apprenticeships in South Africa and to trace the legacy imprint of direct and indirect race-based exclusion as well as the imprint of educational deprivation in social class terms. The policy trajectory shows how an apprenticeship curriculum that had to cater for White working-class youth with low educational credentials led to a steady erosion of the formal knowledge component of the curriculum in favour of practical workplace experience. Alongside race-based exclusion, a neglect of science-based knowledge emerges as a lasting curriculum legacy of apprenticeship trajectories under conditions of segregation, Apartheid and their colonial precursors.
Acknowledgments
I am endebted to the journal reviewers for their knowledgeable comments and suggestions, which forced me to rethink a number of issues. I am particularly grateful to my colleague, Volker Wedekind, for his ongoing intellectual engagement with the paper and for taking on the role of critical reader at key moments.
I started working on this paper just before the first Covid 19 lock-down in South Africa. Libraries were already closed and in the months that followed Laureen Rushby, Special Collections librarian at the University of Cape Town, went out of her way to source digital copies of historical documents. I owe her special gratitude and acknowledgment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.