Abstract
The learners at Ngomso School (pseudonym meaning ‘tomorrow’), situated in a small city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, were not yet born when Nelson Mandela addressed the nation and the world upon his release from prison. Only a minority could have witnessed the unprecedented queues during the general election of 1994. The oldest would have been four years old when education became an integral component of constitutionalized promises that the injustices of apartheid would be overturned. However, the young men and women who became my interlocutors during fieldwork in and around Ngomso in 2011 and 2013 were fashioning their lives amid the legacy of these very public displays, pronouncements, and experiences of hope. Given this context, this chapter considers schooling in relation to processes of self-fashioning and conceptualizations of hope.
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Pattenden, O. (2017). Schooling in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Hopes, Struggles, and Contested Responsibilities. In: Stambach, A., Hall, K. (eds) Anthropological Perspectives on Student Futures. Anthropological Studies of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54786-6_6
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