ABSTRACT
During the three years that have passed since South Africa’s democratic government was elected to power in April 1994, much attention has been given to restructuring the country’s education system. Underpinning an ideology of moving from an elite to a mass system of education has been a desire to foster modernization and democratic nation-building. A paradigm shift to student-centred learning through an outcomes-based curriculum, combining education and vocational training, has been championed by education experts to ensure the education system meets South Africa’s needs as it moves towards the twenty-first century. In a context of fiscal discipline and the persistence of apartheid’s legacy of educational disadvantage, student tutors are ideally placed to assist in realizing national educational goals. This chapter out-lines the established network of student tutoring at the University of the Witwatersrand, drawing on two case studies to show how as a strategy it is successfully responding to the new education vision.
