The African Union Ten Years After: Solving African Problems with Pan-Africanism and the African Renaissance

CHAPTER 4 - The Impact of Model ‘C’ Schooling on Africanisation of Potential African Intellectuals

49 CHAPTER 4 The Impact of Model ‘C’ Schooling on Africanisation of Potential African Intellectuals Leepo Modise INTRODUCTION Since the end of apartheid, the people of South Africa have witnessed signi ficant political, economic and educational development with far-reaching consequences for global order. For instance, since the apartheid era, South Africa has benefited from the triumph of globalisation, whereas African languages, the indigenous knowledge system and African culture have been harmed. In today’s environment, education provides individuals with a better chance of employment, which, in turn, leads to a better lifestyle, power and status. The commodification of knowledge as intellectual property has occurred particularly with regard to connecting the intellectual work of universities with community, business, and government interests and priorities. While such a tendency is often welcomed by so-called applied disciplines, it causes tension between the more profitable applied subjects of science and technology, and those of basic theoretical enquiry, particularly in the arts and humanities. It also creates institutional winners (dominant members) and losers (subordinate members). These institutional winners force the global language (English) onto African people. African people in Africa and the Diaspora have historically been required to learn English in order to participate in the wider political and commercial aspects of society. The English-only requirement has not been imposed without social consequences. Myron Lustig and Jolene Koester argue that members of dominant cultures will often devalue the language styles of subordinate cultural members and judge the ‘correctness’ of their use of preferred speech patterns. In some cases, members of the subordinate cultures will try to accommodate or adapt their speech to that of the dominant culture. In other circumstances, they will very deliberately emphasise their group’s unique speech characteristics when they are in the presence of people of the dominant culture.1 Through that imposition of 50 CHAPTER 4 English, Africans in Africa and the Diaspora have opted for assimilation into Western education and culture. Through this process of assimilation, most African intellectuals send their children to Model C schools, where these children are not really recognised as equals to European children. Through actions and words, they are continuously reminded that the history , culture, scholarship and everything else are the Westerners’ history, culture and scholarship without any African contribution. This paper will focus on the role played by the language used in the educational system in South Africa to de-Africanise potential African intellectuals. The first observation is a simple one: there simply seems to be a lack of African consciousness and awareness amongst the African intellectuals when they choose schools for their children and lacuna within the educational system in South Africa to redress the existing lacuna on African languages, culture and identification. Furthermore, African intellectuals themselves seem to be unaware that there is a lack of African awareness and consciousness within the contents of learning areas taught and learned in preferred Western-oriented schools (Model C schools). Myron Lustig and Jolene Koester argue that in the United States, the patterns associated with the European-American culture have tended to dominate educational systems, often making it difficult for learners and parents from other cultures to participate effectively in schools. The same patterns are found in South African Western-oriented schools; hence recommendations will be made on the multi-faceted training of potential African intellectuals to be empowered with multi-lingual and multi-cultural knowledge and skills through a multi-dimensional educational model as an African compromising stance. This paper analyses the impact of utilising the global language as a medium of instruction in the educational system in South Africa. THE IMPACT OF GLOBALISATION ON POTENTIAL AFRICAN INTELLECTUALS Globalisation reflects the effect on culture and brings about a new form of cultural imperialism. The rise of a new cultural imperialism is shaping potential African intellectuals, the future citizens of the world, into ‘global de-Africanised citizens’, intelligent people with a broad range of skills and knowledge to apply to a competitive, information-based society. The future of countries often lies in their ability to compete in a global market where industry-based economies are giving way to knowledge-based industries, realising the importance of ‘knowledge, skills and the intellectual capacity to meet the challenges of accelerated change and uncertainty’. Education is becoming a lifelong learning and training process developing transferable 51 THE IMPACT OF MODEL ‘C’ SCHOOLING ON AFRICANISATION OF POTENTIAL AFRICAN INTELLECTUALS...