ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the first curriculum was structured, focusing on the curriculum for reading and for number in the Foundation Phase. It considers the strong political project of C2005, and the attempt to devolve knowledge decisions to the teacher and learner in the classroom. The chapter shows how this radical constructivist project coupled with a shift to a competency-based form of curriculum at the school level subordinated the specification of formal knowledge to the description of generic outcomes. The imagined learner that had been defined progressively in the apartheid curriculum in relation to skills is sustained in this curriculum, but is also defined in relation to the democratic project. The model of the teacher reflects perhaps what the new democracy held as its ideal, but could not have been further from the reality of teachers emerging from the personal and professional degradation of apartheid schooling.
