Juxtaposing the post-apartheid (South Africa) and the post-Civil Rights (Southern State) Social Studies Curriculum

The United States and South Africa shared a similar history of oppression, racial discrimination and segregation. Now that these eras are in the past, how do the curriculum of schools in both places reflect the historical changes? It is my belief that social issues should be addressed in the curriculum of schools. I will be reviewing literature and comparing these two eras post-apartheid and post-civil right in the curriculum of the schools. Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1991 and the country’s first multicultural election was held in 1994. Since South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections the Ministry of Education has introduced three national curriculum reform initiatives focused on schools to purge the apartheid curriculum of “racially offensive and outdated content (Jansen 1997, King-McKenzie, et al 2013). In the case of the United States, legal segregation began in 1896 when the Supreme Court sanctioned separation of blacks and white races in Plessy v. Ferguson, and again by Brown v. Board of Education Court Case that outlawed segregation in public education facilities. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 officially put an end to legal segregation. Gates (2014) says the “curriculum must reflect the history and stories of the other as the stories of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, …, shaping stories and myths about ourselves that each American shares at the deepest level about what America is, was, and continues to mean.