article · Frontiers in Education
South African curriculum reforms, including C2005, NCS, and CAPS, have failed to disrupt systemic socio-economic inequalities. Schools continue to experience violence, stratification, vandalism, and crime, mirroring broader social crises such as poverty, unemployment, xenophobia, and gender-based violence. Using document analysis grounded in critical pedagogy and socio-cultural capital theories, the investigation assesses how policies, practices, and influential figures sustain these apartheid-era disparities through symbolic violence and exclusion. The findings demonstrate that neoliberal-minimalist policies have strongly driven ongoing socio-economic inequalities across the country. Furthermore, existing educational scholarship has largely overlooked neoliberalism as the primary cause of these persistent divides, pointing to structural policy failures within the national education system.
Despite repeated curriculum reforms, South African schools and communities remain burdened by deep poverty, division, and violence. By linking educational shortfalls directly to neoliberal policies, this research highlights structural flaws that simple curriculum revisions cannot resolve. It offers educational leaders, policymakers, and civic organisations critical insight into why past interventions have faltered and where systemic reform must actually focus.
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In this study, we argue that the different curriculum reforms South Africa embarked on have not really helped break the existing socio-economic inequalities. Precisely, the various reforms (e.g., C2005, NCS, and CAPS) initiated by the South African government have been proved to be a flop and uninspiring considering that schools have remained spaces where inequalities, violence, vandalism, harassment, stratification, and various crimes continue to exist. Outside the schooling spaces, unemployment, poverty, xenophobia, robbery, GBVs, and different forms of crime have characterized South African society. Many educational researchers have also argued that these issues could symbolize a broken education system that is guided by shoddy policies. Accordingly, we sought to establish key issues that confront South African educational system to explain how these reproduce the apartheid-era-like inequalities. In the main, we established that neoliberal-minimalist policies have significantly influenced socio-economic inequalities in South Africa. We also established that educational researchers have failed to identify neoliberalism as the root cause of South Africa's inequalities. To achieve our goals, we utilized document analysis to explain and understand how various policies, practices, and powerful individuals have influenced these injustices. Theoretically, these debates have been guided by Paul Freire's “Critical Pedagogy” and Bourdieu's “Social-cultural Capital” mainly for their ability to illuminate power relations, exclusions, and inequalities through Symbolic Violence and depravations.
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DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2023.1132167
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