Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

Language policy debates in South Africa concern only Black African language speaking children rather than White English and Afrikaans speaking children. These debates construct Black African children as learners with deficits and fail to acknowledge their language resources. At the same time, policy makers fail to critique the unjust system to…

The start of the Education for All (EFA) movement ushered in a new era in education, an era linked to research on issues such as "global governance" or the "world institutionalization of education". This global governance not only affects the way in which educational systems are influenced, it also involves how we view and…

The 10-year anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa in 2004 provoked much reflection and fuelled new policy debates on both the progress and failures of educational reform. While a myriad of achievements have been touted and are well-known to international audiences, a swelling critique from inside South Africa shows that…