The book is the first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people. It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.
Human Sciences Research Council (Sat,) studied this question.