Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Impact of Apartheid on Educational Psychology in South Africa 367
positions being seen as God’s representatives), rather than individual rights, being paramount.
School Guidance was introduced into all White schools as a part of this system of indoctrination,
with learners being assigned tutors who would keep a careful watch over their development.
Psychology as a subject was viewed by the policy-makers as subversive, and was replaced by
the philosophy of Fundamental Pedagogics (to be discussed below). Psychometric testing was
developed to assist with “correct” job placement, and favored White learners, since they were
tested in their home language. Whilst there was some psychometric testing in Black schools, this
was mainly a bureaucratic window-dressing exercise and the results were never discussed with
the learners, if the tests were returned to the schools at all.
The School Guidance syllabi for Black and White learners are an example of the different
ways in which the Nationalist government strove to maintain social control. For Whites, there
were emphases on conformity to ruling party attitudes and beliefs, and adherence to group norms,
whilst for Blacks the emphasis was on preparation to be workers who were obedient to those in
authority.
There are thus gross disparities between schools that have emerged from the different education
departments, with the most poorly serviced schools being in the rural areas. The influence of the
Nationalist ideologies was pervasive in education, and still endures in many schools even though
there have been great efforts to change this. In the following section, I describe the underpinning
philosophy.
Fundamental Pedagogics
Fundamental Pedagogics (FP) was derived from a Dutch theorist in phenomenology
(Langeveld), and became the most influential philosophy in SA education. The resulting principles
became the foundations of training in education in the Afrikaans-speaking universities
and subsequently in most teacher-training colleges. In FP special terms were developed to drive
attitudes to practice, such as “ortho-didactics” (right teaching methods), “pedo-diagnosis,” and
“pedo-therapy” (using the prefix “pedo” to emphasize the difference between children and adults).
Many university departments of educational psychology developed separately from departments
of psychology, often situated in different faculties, due to education taking the more conservative
stance of FP, and developing rigid outlooks on the aims, purposes, and methodology of teaching.
FP provided a theoretical basis, which was congruent with CNE because it supported an
hierarchically structured education system, in which educators were regarded as purveyors of
knowledge, superior to their learners due to their training and their conformity to Nationalist
policies of education. The thrust of pedagogy was to emphasize the knowledge and wisdom of
those placed in positions of authority, and the relative powerlessness of the learner who was
expected to conform to the dominant group norms.
FP developed a theory of deviance where the “different” or “conspicuous” learner was seen as a
person challenging the social realities and the normative principles of the society. Educators were
therefore encouraged to identify such a learner in order to “re-orientate” (i.e., “indoctrinate”)
the young person to be able to resist what were seen as “onslaughts of foreign ideologies” both
from the more liberal first world, and from communism. Educators were bound by strict syllabi,
encapsulated in textbooks carefully vetted by the education departments, and little deviance from
the laid-down content of the syllabus was tolerated. This was further entrenched by a wellstructured
examination system from grade 5, leading to teaching being focused on examinations
for learners from about age ten onward.
In the authoritarian system that emerged, learners were not encouraged to think independently
or question, rote learning became the chief means of success, and decisions were generally made
for the learner. Eventually, it was hoped that learners would be inculcated with a philosophy of life