A Study On Democratic South African Basic Education Curriculum Reform

Since democratic government was established in1994, South Africa society had come to a comprehensive transformation and education was bound to the central part of social reform because of education being the key field of social transformation. As basic education reform is the foundation of education transformation and curriculum reform is the core of basic education reform, thus how to perform basic education curriculum reform in order to meet social transformation needs and human resource demands generated by economic and social development is a noteworthy issue.On the basis of introduction, this paper firstly presents the social backgrounds of South Africa basic education curriculum reform, and then it focuses on the development of basic education curriculum reform. Ministry of South African Education introduced national curriculum reform program 《Curriculum2005》 in1997, coming up with reform concept of "Outcome-based education". Ministry of Education reflected upon the problems emerging in the new curriculum implementation and made a review for 《Curriculum2005》 in2000, and then in2002policy statement 《National Curriculum Statement》,《Revised National Curriculum Statement Grades R-9(Schools)》,《National Curriculum Statement Grade10-12(General)》 was introduced step by step. Thirdly, the fourth part of the paper comprehensively illustrates the latest progress of South African basic education curriculum reform since2009.The difficult point of this paper is about how to appropriately evaluate South African basic education curriculum reform. After South African curriculum reform, all schools followed a national integrated curriculum which attaches great importance to developing students’comprehensive abilities like knowledge, skill and values; meanwhile the way of teaching and learning was improved; the teacher profession development received attention and diversified assessment system broke the traditional framework between students’ development level and corresponding grade. Some problems and challenges encountered in curriculum implementation (eg. curriculum policy complexity, lacking of unity, external support deficiency and some difficulties in classroom implementation) affected the effectiveness of curriculum implementation.Although the process of South African curriculum reform does not run smoothly, the experience of curriculum reform still possesses reference and enlightenment.