The South African School Context and Inclusive Education

1. Introduction

The South Africa school system is characterised by complexity, incomplete transition (Van Der Berg and Hofmeyr 2018) and poverty and privilege (Spaull 2013), in a society that continues to be divided (Moses, van der Berg and Rich 2017). The South African school system continues to be “bimodal”, with “highly unequal learning” (Van Der Berg and Hofmeyr 2018, n.p.). Bimodality generally refers to something having or involving two modes. The two modes of the South African education system are perceived as formerly privileged and well-resourced schools which perform well and under-privileged poorly resourced schools which perform dismally (Van Der Berg and Hofmeyr 2018). This is a legacy of the dual system that informs the South African school context profoundly. The context is very uneven in relation to many aspects of schooling such as the identity of the school, the calibre of educators, the characteristics of the support staff and the arms of school management as well as the type of learners. The location of the school also plays a critical role in the interpretation of the school context in South Africa. Urban schools are known to enjoy access to resources, while rural schools suffer from lack of resources, signifying structural inequalities between model C and rural schools (Nyundu 2016). The term “model C” is used to describe former whites-only schools in South Africa (Christie and McKinney 2017). The education dual system is the legacy of the apartheid system that designed education for the whites and education for the blacks. This dualism propelled many other dualisms within the education sector. However, dual systems may mean different things to different contexts. In this chapter, education dual system shall mean urban – rural unequal distribution of educational goods and services (du Plessis, Pierre and Mestry 2019). If many of the educational challenges of rural schools are to decrease, prioritisation of rural schools, has to take precedence in all aspects. Dysfunctional and dilapidated schools have to be rebuilt and best qualified teachers incentivised and retention to teach in rural schools (Sisouphanthong, Suruga and Kyophilavong 2020).

The South African dual system of education refuses to address issues of inclusion, for by its very nature, the system is exclusionary, promoting the “identity of ‘otherness’” (Davids and Waghid 2015 155). Thus, there are still pockets of society who feel that education has to be exclusionary and only must cater for their own kind. This is manifested by so many cases of discrimination on the bases of race, language, culture, religion, citizenship and economic status and other factors (Roux 2016). This context perpetuates non-cohesion, segregation, exclusion and othering of fellow citizens who might enrich it if the contrary were to be true (Crush and Tawodzera 2014). The dual system compromises the social cohesion project and allows for South African youth to grow up wondering and making assumptions about others different from them. There are great disparities between learners from both systems as discussed about and their performance upon entering higher education. Those from well resourced schools are likely to perform better. Those from less resources and marginalised schools most struggle with a lot of issues. Firstly, transition from rural to urban areas becomes challenging to most. Language becomes a huge challenge as most might not have used another language more than their home language in learning (Xulu-Gama and Hadebe 2022). Writing proves to be another challenge experienced by learners from less resourced schools.