This paper will first show how South Africa's system of racially-differentiated mass schooling came into being over the last century. The conditions and manner under which this occurred entrenched deep inequalities. The next section will show how and in what context these legacies were addressed in the post-1994 period. The paper concludes with a discussion of continuities and contradictions between the achievements of democracy and continuing historical and structural inequalities and their impact on education in a period of economic decline. As an overview, it relies mainly on secondary literature.
Human Sciences Research Council (Wed,) studied this question.