Chapter 5 - Curriculum, Language, Textbooks and Teachers

Summary

How did Bantu Education change what was taught in the Hermannsburg schools? In theory, colonial curricula had emphasised manual and industrial education, and teaching in the mother tongue, long before the advent of Bantu Education. In practice, what was taught in schools depended on the official curriculum, but especially on the teachers and whatever textbooks and resources were available. Industrial education, for example, could only be provided if the mission was able to buy the necessary equipment and tools for the boys’ activities and the cleaning and sewing materials for the girls. Earlier chapters have suggested that, although Hermannsburg Mission schools had to comply with provincial curricula in order to qualify for a state grant and therefore taught English as well as the mother tongue, the missionaries’ main emphasis lay in the schools’ religious purpose. The latter was evident in the schoolbooks that the Hermannsburg Mission Press continued to produce in Tswana until the 1960s. Primers or readers consisting of the alphabet and basics of sentence construction, as well as stories, always had a religious content. Religious verses were part and parcel of learning the alphabet, and religious stories and hymns were interspersed with tales of animals and local ethnic history.

At the beginning of the 1950s, the vast majority of African children received a rudimentary schooling, with no education beyond the primary, and others had no education at all. This meant that those who became teachers generally qualified with a Lower Primary Certificate or eight years of schooling. Before apartheid, teachers were generally white missionaries and mission recruits. In line with its overall approach, the Department of Bantu Education sought to dispense with the services of teachers from Europe in mission schools and to employ only African teachers for African schools. In particular, they wanted only women teachers in the early grades, in part because expansion depended on paying more teachers less, and female teachers were not only less qualified but also earned less than their male counterparts. Black teachers were generally not well trained. The situation did not improve with the implementation of apartheid policies, as qualifications of teachers fell rather than rose during the 1960s. And by 1968, 40.71% still had only the Lower Primary Certificate.