“The future face of education”: An ethnographic account of digitalisation and its impact on South Africa’s public schooling system

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Date

2023

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University of the Western Cape

Abstract

In recent decades, the insertion of digitalised schooling practices has been propagated as South Africa’s best solution to successfully address its crisis of education. As such, the digitalisation of the classroom, which is a dominant position held in education policy reform, is believed to be the ‘great equaliser’ of an educational landscape that is marred by an inheritance and persistence of an unequal level of access to resources as well as disparities faced in the quality education provided‒a circumstance that is highly detrimental to the country’s underprivileged communities. However, as these technical systems become embedded within socio-economic and political structures, with powerful actors staking their own vested interests in the expansionist project of digital media in schools across the globe, an important critique emerges in the reimagining of South Africa’s education system: what does this future schooling system look like and who, exactly, is it meant for?

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Keywords

Crisis Of Education, Education Policy Reform, Future Schooling System, Education Inequalities, Digitalised Education

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