By

The primary task of this thesis is to explain the establishment of the ‘correctional institution’, the Ottery School of Industries, in Cape Town in 1948 and the programmes of rehabilitation, correctional and vocational training and residential care that the institution developed in the period until 1968. This explanation is located in the wider context of debates about welfare and penal policy in South Africa. The overall purpose is to show how modernist discourses in relation to social welfare, delinquency, and education came to South Africa and was mediated through a racial lens unique to this country. In so doing the thesis uses a broad range of material and levels of analysis from the ethnographic to the documentary and historical. The work seeks to locate itself at the intersection of the fields of education, history, welfare, penality and race in South Africa. The unique contribution of the study lies in the ways in which it engages with the nature of welfare institutions that took the form of Schools of Industries in the apartheid period. The thesis asserts that the motivation for the development of the institution under apartheid was not just the extension of crude apartheid policy, but was also inspired by welfarist and humanitarian goals. In this regard the thesis uses the life histories of nine informants who were pupils at Ottery in the period under review, to demonstrate what can be revealed about social policy and apartheid through studies of a ethnographic nature.