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In setting up the context within which formal education is enacted, and from which individual chapters in this book emerge and respond to, this chapter critically reviews the theoretical foundations of the concept ‘education for public good’. As a consistently touted concept, the chapter reveals its analytical and practical limitations, inadequacies and detrimental effects in formal education. Implicit in the concept, the chapter argues, is an unintended perpetuation of coloniality, a phenomenon that continues to ‘devour’ and undermine all well-intentioned postcolonial/post-apartheid educational policies. The chapter concludes with offering a possible alternative: ‘education for common good’, and presents the Reading to Learn pedagogy as one of the perspectives on curriculum as praxis. This pedagogy is also presented as compatible to ‘education for common good’, capable of enabling a shift from teaching what to learn, to how to learn.
Mgqwashu et al. (2024) studied this question.