This paper provides some of the political context for the development of the school curriculum in the period after apartheid, pointing out that the curriculum that was drafted originally under the rubric ‘Curriculum 2005’ had to be substantially modified without loss of political face because of the practical difficulties of implementation. The new version of the curriculum still bears discursive traces of the old, most notably with regard to globalisation, but has also been subject to diverse intellectual influences. The paper pays special attention to the treatment of History in the curriculum, and to the way in which it tries to present race.
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