Knowledge, curriculum and qualifications for South African Further Education

Economic growth in South Africa depends on engineering capacity to provide state-of-the-art, safe infrastructure for service delivery. At the same time the new democracy needs to address transformation. This monograph explores current capacity to address these challenges.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment and is renowned for being one of the most unequal societies in the world. In this context, training and education play critical roles in helping young people escape poverty and unemployment.

The practice of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) in the education of adults seeks to affirm and accredit the knowledge and skills which they have already attained in the course of their working lives. This monograph explores the implementation of RPL in a programme designed to upgrade tens of thousands of under-qualified teachers and finds a baffling dilemma: how does one value prior learning which one believes to be misguided, outdated, or inappropriate?

In a compelling blend of narrative history and social analysis, Prophets and Profits contributes to the global literature on educational change by analysing the impact of both managerialism and religious extremism on the restructuring of Jewish community schools in Johannesburg. A landmark study in South Africa, this work is also of international interest because it brings together two divergent yet connected tendencies in current educational transformation. These are the neo-liberal ideologies of the market, manifesting in the application of managerial approaches to school management, and the resurgence of ethnic and religious communities in search of identity. This paradox of globalisation is extremely topical and gains added interest when set against the extraordinary story of transformation in South Africa.