Education

• Education


  Became an important issue for the apartheid lawmakers
• Education for Africans prior to 1948


  • Racially segregated
  • Small number attended elite mission schools with broad syllabus and white/black teachers
  • Great bulk of schools gave only basic primary education
• Only 24 percent of black South Africans were recorded as literate in the 1951 census
• Bantu Education Act of 1953


  • Brought schools for African students directly under state control
  • Segregated the content of education
• Expanding African education


  Seen as essential for the changing labour market
• Bantu education


  Should prepare African people for only limited roles and opportunities after school
• Black students before 1950s


  • Able to attend University of Fort Hare and a few hundred admitted to Universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand
  • Received same training as white students
• Fort Hare had become a leading centre of black student opposition to apartheid
• Extension of University Education Act 1959


  • Ensured Fort Hare came under government control
  • Segregated the largely white English-language universities and set out plans for new universities for African ethnic groups and other racially defined minorities
• Hendrik Verwoerd, the Minister of Native Affairs: 'My department's policy is that education should stand with both feet in the reserves and have its roots in the spirit and being of Bantu society... The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community in all respects. There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. Within his own community, however, all doors are open.'