Realising the Dream: Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school is an intellectual and practical response to the dangers that come with the ubiquity of race, race-thinking and its attendant propensity to subsume the nuances of all other social complexity.
Beginning with a comprehensive scoping of the theoretical literature on race and social difference, the book delivers a meticulous examination of how the 'logic of race' is played out in the lives of post-apartheid South African school students. Based in two decades of empirical research, this compelling and insightful analysis reveals how the ongoing preoccupation with race not only obscures but also prevents the evolution of new ways of understanding privilege and subordination.
We dream of a better world. The fundamental promise of education, the author argues, is to develop the capacity to make real, in our will and desire, this possibility. However, the dream can be fully realised only when the learnt prejudices and false certainties of race, gender and indeed all our unproblematised conceits about who and what we are, are unlearnt. Written by one of South Africas foremost theorists of school education, this book is as brave as it is challenging an inspiring, essential read for education practitioners and students in particular, and social theorists more broadly.
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Tables
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and acronyms
Introduction 'Hey you black man, hey you white woman': Calling race
- Social difference and its history
- The obdurate nature of race
- Creolisation, multiplicity, education and identity
- The racial nature of South African schooling
- Constituting the class: Integration in South African schools
- The asymmetries of contact in the South African school
- Reconstituting privilege: Integration in former white schools
- The complexity of subordination in the new South Africa
- Structure and agency: Young South Africans struggling against history
- Thinking and living our way forward
References
Index
