Abstract:
Historians can contribute significantly to education historiography to bolster education
transformation. Contemporary scholarship in education, in the main, mostly wrestles
with the current dispensation’s transformation of education policy endeavours in the
post-apartheid era. While there is no substantial or insurmountable disagreement on the
education policy objectives in post-apartheid South Africa, much of the contestations seem
to arise from how these objectives should be realised to achieve their lofty ideals. This is
where learning from history is important. History is not merely concerned with constructing
knowledge through relooking the past but also attending to the “selection” and “silences”
over time. Among other things, South Africa’s history also provides significant insights into
how education contributed to developing a first-world economy in the country. This article
argues that, because of education’s ability to enable social and economic mobility to affect
families, communities, and society in general positively, education is a public good that
requires historians’ involvement and attention. The article also considers the significance
of funding education as a public good. Consequently, the paper argues that historians can
make a significant contribution to transforming education in their continuous rewriting of
history to learn from the past and foreground education as a public good in the past and
present for the future.
