Quality education is an effective equalizer in an unequal world. The link between cyclical poverty and a lack of quality education is well understood, as is the inextricable link between the provision of quality education and sustainable economic growth. As governments, policymakers, civil society, and ordinary citizens work together to make…

Background: Litigation has been utilised to advance a range of socio-economic rights in post-apartheid South Africa, including the right to basic education. Nonetheless, there has not been significant litigation or sustained broad-based mobilisation around issues impacting the early childhood development (ECD) sector in the democratic era. The…

South Africa must embark upon the third epoch of education policy after the failures of the first two epochs: the 1953-1994 ("apartheid") era and the 1994-2021 era (the dawn of democracy and the dismantling of apartheid structures). There were not enough education opportunities to guide all the children of the country to maturity and…

Education commonly is positioned as central to developing citizens who can address so-called global challenges. Responses are identifiable in global citizenship education, which may recruit mathematics into interdisciplinary relationships, and within mathematics education itself. However, if notions of the global and local, the citizen,…

While acknowledging higher education's complicity in inequality, the premise of this paper is that curriculum transformation can be one means of challenging and dismantling structural injustices towards the goal of equity of access and outcomes. Fraser's multi-dimensional framework for social justice is drawn upon to explore what this…

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…

South Africa as a nation became democratic in 1994 because of the end of apartheid. Since 1994, higher education has geared towards transformation and redress of the inequalities created by the inhuman policies of apartheid. While few applaudable steps have been taken towards this direction, South African higher education remains largely…

In view of the serious moral decay in South African society, this article reports on our research regarding the role of the school in the inculcation of citizenship values (as part of the brief of South African education). We regard a set of citizenship values consonant with a democratic dispensation to be a core component of a moral order…

The problem addressed in this theoretical paper is that of learners and educators as agents of social transformation in dysfunctional schools of South Africa. While 80% of South African schools are said to be dysfunctional, learners and educators in these schools can be activated to challenge and actively struggle against any form of social…

Why have many developing countries that have succeeded in expanding access to education made such limited progress on improving learning outcomes? There is a growing recognition that the learning crisis constitutes a significant dimension of global inequality and also that educational outcomes in developing countries are shaped by political as…

Access to quality education for all children is a common mantra for countless national and world organizations, such as the UN and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper examines the struggle within two nations who continue to move beyond the impact of racial segregation in the United States (US) and "apartheid" in South…

Equitable funding of public schools to reduce the disparities in education inherited by the post-apartheid government of South Africa in 1994 has become a priority. The Amended National Norms and Standards for School Funding (ANNSSF) required the ranking of schools into one of five quintiles of which Quintile 1 represents the poorest schools and…

Despite wide-ranging policies and practices intended to address historical inequalities in South African higher education, and calls for decolonisation to include more local relevance, little attention has been paid to the experiences of rural students, especially their digital participation once at university. Previous research has highlighted…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine teaching approaches adopted by teachers in ex-Model C English medium secondary schools (former mono-ethnic White Schools) currently in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, after schools became desegregated in 1994 and changed from being mono-ethnic to multi-ethnic. Design/methodology/approach: This study…

The term "social justice" cuts across disciplines and theoretical orientations. Critical theory underpinned the study reported on in this article. Many South African schools, particularly in poverty stricken communities, still experience insurmountable economic and social injustices despite progress since the apartheid regime. The…