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Abstract
This paperinterrogates the relationship between South Africa's most important piece of educational policy, the South African Schools Act (SASA) (Republic of South Africa, 1996b), and learner identity. It seeks to understand how this central piece of South African educational legislation foreshadows, intersects with, foregrounds, prescribes and/or disturbs dominant notions of South African learner identity. What does the SASA say about the South African learner and particularly about what it expects the learner to be? The perspective used in this paper is that identity is constructed from history, memory, social and cultural institutions and power apparatuses. The specific interest of the paper is not to look so much at the mediation of identity in its practical forms, as in actual interchanges between subjects in the classroom, but to develop an understanding of the symbols and signifies that are privileged in the formal and legal prescripts that surround the process of mediation. What significance this holds for the achievement of equality and justice in South Africa is what is explored here.
1.Introduction
The South African Schools Act (SASA) (Republic of South Africa, 1996b) promulgated in 1996 is one of the most important pieces of post-apartheid legislation. It put in place the critical elements required for building an educational system framed by the ideals of the South African constitution. It was not, however, without issues and questions. The purpose of this paper is to examine how it dealt with the challenging question of imagining new learner identities for South Africa's young people. How did it challenge, disrupt and /or reconstitute dominant ideas of learner identity inherited out of apartheid? The issue stimulating this contribution is the challenge of the (re) making of a social order for South Africa which enjoys the trust and commitment of the majority of its people. Apartheid had produced a social order that institutionalised power in particular kinds of ways. While there is an ongoing debate about the fundamental nature of that power, whether it was primarily racial, classed or gendered, there is no question that its symptomatic everyday expression took a racial form. That "everyday" - the classic quotidian - was about ordinary human beings being subjected to detailed sorting and differentiating and ranking and hierarchising processes that began with their...