Current South African history syllabus in need of a makeover

History is set to be made a compulsory subject between Grade 10 and Grade 12.

On Thursday the Department of Basic Education history MTT (Ministerial Task Team) outlined its findings and recommendations at a launch of its history report at a briefing in Pretoria.

The report argued that the Curriculum and Policy Statement (CAPS) has a biased approach towards the liberal school of thought as a dominant historiographical paradigm in South Africa. This is despite the fact that there are five schools of thought in South Africa: the Afrikaner Nationalist, African Nationalist, Black Consciousness and Marxist or Social history schools to be taken into account.

“The African and Black Consciousness schools of thought have been neglected by the CAPS curriculum,” said Professor Sifiso Ndlovu, who was the chairman of the task team.

The team also noted that CAPS only tackles the study of pre-colonial Africa in a superficial manner in the early phases of schooling.

“This means that more than 100,000 years of human biological, social and cultural history that unfolded on the African continent are marginal to the curriculum and is dealt with in lower grades,” said the ministerial task team in their report.

This meant that CAPS fails to treat African history adequately as a continent with a rich historical background, they said.

The report also highlighted the importance of archaeology which has a significant absence in the current education curriculum.

“If these are not taught, learners are unable to understand how the continent's very long human history can be discovered, given the sparseness of indigenous written records for Southern Africa,” said the task team.

According to the MTT, what is discernible about the CAPS curriculum is that the teaching of archaeology is done in a systematic way which does not emphasis the links between the Cradle of Humankind site and corresponding sites in East Africa, namely countries like Kenya and Ethiopia. This also includes Egypt which has a crucial archaeology role especially in understanding the ancient history of North Africa.

Even though archaeology studies are covered in CAPS at a lower grade level, the MTT argues that it is taught in an elementary way and is unsatisfactory. Therefore, the MTT suggested that the current syllabus needs to be overhauled, restructured and aligned in phases, taking into consideration the cognitive development of the pupils.

Other recommendations include:

• By making history a compulsory subject, it should replace life orientation which should be taught until Grade 9 and scrapped as one of the compulsory subjects in the FET level (Grades 10-12);


• Life orientation content should be strengthened in the GET (Grade 7-9) phase;


• Life orientation should then be phased out in six years' time from the FET curriculum and history should be phased in; and


• Two final-year examination papers in Grade 12 should be introduced with paper one focusing on African History and paper two dealing with history of the wider world, including Europe, to create a fair balance in the curriculum which doesn't exist in the current one.