Thwarted promise: Commemorating the 170th Anniversary of the Establishment of the Cape Education Department by Crain SoudienFull articleOn the 23rd May 1839, 170 years ago today, the Cape Colonial government issued a Government Memorandum on Education appointing James Rose-Innes the General Superintendent of Public Education. The order brought into being the Cape Education Department, the forerunner to the Western Cape Education Department. The brief given to Rose-Innes was to be general inspector to visit every public school once a year, to be general registrar for the purpose of estimating attendance and pupil progress, to provide government with an annual report and, as leader of the teachers, to ‘hold constant communication with the instructors of the various schools on the method of instruction. He also took it upon himself to develop the system’s curriculum. He established what came to be known as the ‘graded’ system. This consisted of classes of schools, a First Class to be established in larger towns and offering a high school education, a Second Class for smaller towns of a primary school nature, and, subsequently, a Third Class for the children of farmers. Alongside of these, to be incorporated into the public system from 1843, there existed a network of mission schools run by religious denominations of various kinds. These, for a variety of reasons, featured only slightly in the sights of the new department, but for the whole of the 19th century constituted the backbone of the public education system.
Remembering this date today is more than a historical curiosity. The establishment of the Department was important for a number of reasons. The appointment of a Superintendent-General and the creation of a public school system took place here earlier than it did in most parts of the world. Prussia had, in 1817 already, appointed a Minister of Education and was probably the world’s leader in developing an administrative apparatus and culture for public education. A similar office was established in the state of New York only in 1854. In relation to these, the Cape was amongst the first in the world to institute the office of the Superintendent.
The more important reason to commemorate the event is for the promise it constituted and to bring into perspective the systematic way in which this promise was betrayed, first by the Colonial government itself, and then, thoroughly so, by the apartheid government that was to come into being in 1948.
What was this promise? The Department was established in the wake of the final abolition of slavery at the Cape and the evolution of a system of government that was conscious of important Enlightenment ideas – habeas corpus, individual human rights and so on. It is true that the Cape Colonial government that would evolve over the 19th century would come to lay the basis for the institutionalisation of inequality, racial, gender and class, but it was by no means historically so ordained. Legally committed to the idea of equality, a gendered and classed one it must be conceded, the Cape and the social experience it embodied, especially in education, promised the possibility of a world free of social distinction. One of the moving figures in the establishment of the Cape Education Department was the famous newspaper editor John Fairbairn. He urged that the government should choose for its superintendent a person who would be “able to estimate at their practical value, or rather at their real nothingness, with respect to his office the microscopic differences of colour, Nation, Language, Rank and the Sectional distinctions of Religion.” Significantly this sentiment was given material expression by the government of the day. Reminding the new department of what its mandate was J. Moore Craig, Acting Secretary to the Government wrote to Rose-Innes on 18 February, 1842 as follows: “In regard to the right of being admitted into the Government schools, and the privilege thereby conferred, it has been determined, that the elementary course of instruction, laid down in the memorandum referred to, shall be free, and that the schools shall be accessible to all classes of the community.”
This commitment was, sadly, not to be fulfilled. A school system developed rapidly beginning with fewer than twenty schools in 1839 and by the end of the century reaching approximately 1200 schools. The system itself was complex. Subsidies were low forcing in the 1860s the pound-for-pound principle to be instituted. This would lead, as is the case today, to wealthier sections of the community being able to develop sophisticated institutions, some of which even offered higher education. In them were to be found children of colour. More critical about the system was the degree to which it operated like a ranking system, sorting out and reproducing the Colony’s nascent class structure. In the process, the mission schools that had been established for the purpose of proselytising amongst the non-Christian former slaves, Khoisan and African people, became the schools of choice for all people in the Colony. Because they were cheaper than the other classes of all schools, parents of all backgrounds elected to send their children there rather than to the more expensive schools.
In the climate of the discovery of minerals in the northern parts of the country and with an eye to resolving white Afrikaner-English conflicts, having white children in the same schools as people of colour became intolerable to key sections of the political leadership at the Cape. The commitment to an open schooling system was abandoned in a series of devious manoeuvres. It began with Langham Dale, Rose-Innes’ successor, reinterpreting the 1839 Government Memorandum as having been intended for the ‘European colonists’ and the working up of an idea that it was the destiny of white children to become employers of labour. For this they needed a class of education that was ‘beyond the needs of the coloured races’. The arguments raised in justification of this move were hardly subtle, but striking amongst them were racial, class and gender conceits that continue to have a resonance in the present. “The serious objection”, said Dale in 1890, “is to the mixture of the so-called street Arab with the white girls.” By 1905 the Department had forgotten the commitments it had made in 1839 and had promoted a Schools Board Act which did not explicitly rule out the possibility of schools admitting children of colour, but effectively gave school boards the rights to do so. And so what had begun as a promising chapter of social renewal and inclusion was turned into a story of bitter rejection for many families of colour.
