The legacy imprint of apprenticeship trajectories under conditions of segregation and Apartheid in South Africa

In many countries, the contours of skills formation systems are traced back to early struggles over control of apprenticeship. This paper uses a curriculum lens to examine two distinctive policy moments in the history of formal apprenticeships in South Africa and to trace the legacy imprint of direct and indirect race-based exclusion as well as the imprint of educational deprivation in social class terms. The policy trajectory shows how an apprenticeship curriculum that had to cater for White working-class youth with low educational credentials led to a steady erosion of the formal knowledge component of the curriculum in favour of practical workplace experience. Alongside race-based exclusion, a neglect of science-based knowledge emerges as a lasting curriculum legacy of apprenticeship trajectories under conditions of segregation, Apartheid and their colonial precursors.