Liberation pedagogy in the South African Context

Abstract

We have arrived at a time to reflect on what has been done in the field of education for liberation, alternative education or People’s Education during the last few years. We have to analyse and theorise our experience in this country because it is imperative that beacons be set for future action, that direction and goals be determined so that energies now being expended are not wasted or misdirected. That there has been an explosion of liberation pedagogy, in the form of a multiplicity of educational projects and experiments inside and outside of the formal system of schooling since the early ’seventies more or less, is a well known fact. In recent years, many learned articles have appeared that attempt to contextualise this renaissance of learning in South Africa. Most of these have been programmatic and rhetorical or prescriptive insofar as they have dealt with the macro-educational issues involved, or descriptive and tentative insofar as they have confined themselves to micro-educational issues.