The minister’s proposed overhaul of the history curriculum is drawing growing concern for good reason. At its core is a sharp shift away from a broad, globally grounded syllabus toward a narrow, inward-looking framework shaped by the language of “decolonisation of knowledge” via a narrative that emphasises grievance, struggle, and resistance.

Under the existing curriculum, pupils are exposed to the major ideas and events that shaped the modern world. These include the French Revolution, the rise of communism in Russia, the development of capitalism in the United States, the Cold War, and the emergence of the post-1990 global order. These are not peripheral topics. They are the foundations of the world South African pupils must enter and compete within.

Under the proposed changes, much of that material would be removed or reduced for being too Western-centric and capitalist-centric.

The department would have you believe that this is being done to accommodate a focus on ancient African civilisations, oral traditions, and precolonial societies (by all means, have some more of that). But that is just a fig leaf to deflect criticism from the fact that the real objective is thematic, and to shift content towards a woke focus on race, gender, and inequality, framed through an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-Western lens, often extending to provoking militancy against South Africa’s chiefly market-led economic system, and the merits of its democratic order.

The consequence is a curriculum that turns inward at precisely the moment the world is becoming more competitive and interconnected. South African pupils risk being left without the intellectual tools to understand global systems, markets, and power dynamics. In their place, they are offered a narrative that emphasises grievance, struggle, and resistance against the Western liberal order.

That is a dangerous trade. In a country already burdened by extraordinarily high youth unemployment, the deliberate cultivation of militant, anti-capitalist sentiment is not just misguided. It is reckless.