The Reproduction of Inequalities: When Harmonious Desegregation Services Unequal Education
摘要
This article probes an approach to desegregate a school in South Africa. Two sets of data, separated by a period of fourteen years, were analyzed to track the inclusion of Blacks in an all-White primary school. An ethnographic approach was deployed in 2002, entailing embeddedness in the research site over a four-week period. All academic routines and intra- and extra-curricular activities were observed, and parents, teachers, the school leadership, and students were interviewed. The school’s records and documents were perused as well. Fourteen years later, data from interviews with school personnel, parents, students were produced and lessons observed for comparative analysis. The key finding is that there was and continues to be absence of conflict and universal agreement with the school’s inclusion policies. Although the school community valorized and continues to valorize harmony, it not only reflects the subtle ways in which exclusionary practices continue, it also serves as an analytical prism that reveals social engineering for the reproduction of inequalities.