JONATHAN JANSEN: South Africa's devastating obsession with corrective knowledge
'There must be few nations in the world whose university students would go apoplectic about what to do with a dead white man's statue'
What causes a nation to rise or fall is how it thinks about knowledge. Knowledge is either something from the past that needs to be corrected (let's call this corrective knowledge) or something for the future that needs to be appropriated (let's call this prospective knowledge).What devastates South Africa is its obsession with corrective knowledge. You find this in every governmental policy paper (such as whitepapers) and in every university protest action. We are so captured by our past we fixate about making it right. Every education policy since 1994 has long preambles reminding citizens about how terrible the past was (and it was, as if we did not already know) and how saddled we are with that legacy and how righteous we are in seeking to correct that knowledge. There must be few nations in the world whose university students would go apoplectic about what to do with a dead white man's statue. It was as if all the grievances of the past were concentrated in the massive bronze s...
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