CAPE TOWN, South African Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga says the department aims to phase in a new-look curriculum on histoty which will focus more on African history over seven years.
Briefing the media here Tuesday ahead of tabling the department’s Budget Vote at the National Assembly, she added that since the advent of democracy in South Africa, the broader objective for Government was to provide access to education, which is a human right.
She she believed the department was making progress in that regard. However, in the forever changing times, and as the government intensified its efforts to usher in radical economic transformation, she said the curriculum needed to evolve to respond to current dynamics.
In that regard, she said a report of the task force set up to look at making history a compulsory subject in schools would be released on Africa Day and thereafter, interested parties would be invited to give input on the report through nationwide consultations in what will be a festival of ideas on how the history curriculum should look.
Our contention is that we can’t have radical economic transformation without the appropriate and requisite skills. And what does that need? We need a diversified curriculum, we need to be part of the fourth industrial revolution, we need to make sure that there are skills of the future that are imparted to our nation,” she said.
Historyis about history teaching, helping us with cohesion, with nation building, with redress but also creating or teaching our kids about South Africa which is in Africa so that we have an African perspective, we don’t have a Euro-centric history in the context of Africa.
We have set up a huge task team, received a report, we will be launching the report on [Africa Day] and the thrust of the report is that in the next seven years, we have to roll-out a completely new curriculum of history as compared to the current one that we have.
We will phase it in, we will make the necessary adjustment but we will also take the paradigm � the paradigm can’t be a Euro-centric paradigm, which teaches about the French revolution only. They have to know about the French revolution but they have to also know about Haiti just to have an Afro-centric perspective about the rest of the world.
Source: NAM NEWS NETWORK