Ray Basson and Zein Cajee

Curriculum and Positive Ideal Curricula

In his recent review of conceptions of curriculum, Jackson reminds us that curriculum can be seen to refer to both “directed experience” and “undirected experience.”-’ He reminds us that student learning in schools encompasses both what is selected formally for inclusion within a curriculum and taught in classrooms and beliefs learned, for the most part tacitly (in school, from peers, at home) and that comprise an individually constructed biography of meanings built up over time that governs the way the student sees experience in daily life. This expands the commonly accepted notion of curriculum by including learning that is idiosyncratic to individual students and to groups of persons within a school.

Expanding on Jackson, an “undirected experience” curriculum includes a vast range of recipe knowledge referring to learning that is planned deliberately and internalized tacitly, such as learning from one’s parents and extended family (values, attitudes, and routines), religious institutions (predispositions to good and evil), and the media (advertisements teach people to want, documentaries inform, and soap operas reinforce common myths)? Conceiving curriculum in this way makes the point that learning positive beliefs involves both learning about an ideal or a system of beliefs as provided for in the formally constructed and taught component of a school curriculum and following rules learned tacitly that pattern daily life and govern action to make it predictable within a given range.

The distinction between learning “about” and learning as “engaging in activities” is useful for understanding the Islamic component of the multifaith curriculum in question. While the major task of non-Muslim students is likely to be to “learn about” the precepts of Islam as a content, the major task of Muslim students is likely to be to engage with central concepts of Islam from “within” as a personal lived expression of their faith in daily life. This distinction is also central to the design of the curriculum and differentiates it from the predominantly content orientation of both the present widely implemented Bible-centered state curricula and traditional Islamic curricula in private Islamic schools and madaris.

By and large, directed experience curricula, or formally planned programs of instruction, advocating positive ideals are integral to state schooling. They indicate to students both the salient content for learning and the accepted formalizations as indicators of learning. Examples of current curricula advocating positive values in state schools include traditionally designed religious education programs (Religious Education, Bible Education, Religious Instruction, Right Living, and Cultural Studies) and studies in religion, such as Biblical Studies, which features a curriculum designed for Bible study as an academic subject.’ Curricula in private denominational schools and religious schools are more varied in design and include campus crusades: formal worship; catechism classes; Jewish studies, a national consciousness-building program developed in Jewish schools, and madaris or Qur’an schools.

Other curricula developed by organizations outside the sphere of formal education vary considerably and include those planned and implemented by organized Christian, Jewish, and Muslim youth groups. Examples are the curricula of the Student Christian Association and Scripture Union, the Student Jewish Association, and various curricula organized in the Muslim community. These consist of, but are not limited to, programs for students in their late teens organized by the Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa, programs of the Al-Fajr LEAD Centre for infants and younger Muslim children, youth leadership programs for Muslim youths between 6 and 14 years old, and the Muslim Students Association of South Africa, which is present on university campuses throughout the country.

Curricula organized by secular youth organizations include activity based designs, such as the service and experientally - oriented courses of Outward Bound International and its derivatives (Veld and Vlei, South Africa: Outward Bound Lesotho; the International Colleges in Mbabane, Swaziland), and the curricula of the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides, the Duke of Edinburgh Award, and PROTEC. Many of these programs are noted for their innovative designs, but few aim explicitly to incorporate within their curricula the type of learning that takes place both in and out of school to both transmit knowledge content and revivify personal beliefs through the curriculum.

Many of these youth programs have embraced positive ideals over several decades and indirectly have addressed the question of social difference as diversity rather then as a deficit in the wider community.

Likewise, the cluster of Muslim programs particularly reflects international concern for and contests about its particular ideals and beliefs. These programs express a felt need for recognition of a Muslim identity as one among others and as an expression of their contribution to wider community ideals and values within a local and international context in which they perceive fundamental values to be in decline. Accordingly, the Muslim community’s present concern is to transmit Islamic ideals as one faith within the country to students of other faiths and to revivify its ideals for Islamic students in a world religion state program. The Muslim community sees this as in keeping with the wider realization in the present climate of fundamental social change. In addition, it recognizes that difference is one aspect of developing new social relations of desegregation and that there is a need for accommodating distinct ideals-in this instance Islamic ideals-in the construction of a new national identity.

Small as their numbers might be in both southern and South Africa, Muslims are likely to have a significant impact on the design of the proposed world religion program. While it is estimated that one-fifth of the world’s population can be considered Muslim and that Islam is the second most populous religion in France as of 1993, the numerical strength of Muslims in southern Africa is somewhat different. In South Africa they represent 2 percent of a total population of 43 million: while in Botswana they form .3 percent out of 1.8 million people. Muslims form a tiny community of 50,000 out of 10 million Zimbabweans, and in Swaziland Islam has failed to attract large numbers of followers.

Even though their numbers are small in South Africa, during the 1980s Islam began to attract an increasing number of Africans. The impetus for this was visits of internationally recognized Islamic scholars to South Africa in the early 1970s, the growth and influence of spiritual and reform movements like the Tabhghi Jama‘at, and by the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Interest has been renewed in Islam as a result of the Gulf war and the Palestinian uprising (intifadah), as well as by such cult figures as Muhammad Ali visiting South Africa and the screening of such films as “Roots” and “Malcolm X.“ During this period, young Muslims in particular became more organized and coordinated in their activities with a view to developing Islam as a regional force possessing a distinctive African Islamic identity in the post apartheid era.” Including Islamic values-such as God-consciousness (taqwa), revering the prophets, enacting faith through prayer and prohibitions (for example, a stand against substance abuse), and a developed sense of economic charity for the betterment of the community-in this curriculum presents an opportunity that this community is unlikely to forego.

Given curriculum proposals proposed in the new policy documents published by the state,I2 the community,” and such political parties as the African National Congress, there is a feeling that Muslims may well contribute to the curriculum development in ways that do not conflict with the principles underlying the democratic process in education and reflected variously in these documents. Indeed, it is likely that guidelines for the development of educational policies and curricula under the democratically elected government of President Mandela are less likely to emanate from norms and standards established by a central government and a ministry of education than from strong regional or provincial governments, where the development of educational policies and curricula will be guided with reference to principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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