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REALISING THE DREAM: UNLEARNING THE LOGIC OF RACE IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOL Crain Soudien Publisher: HSRC Press: South Africa Year: 2012 ISBN: 978-0-7969-2380-6 (soft cover) ISBN: 978-0-7969-2381-3 (pdf) ISBN: 978-0-7969-2382-0 (e-pub) Pagination: pp.270 Price: £39.00
Written by South Africa's leading theorist of school education, this book invites a reassessment of our understanding of race, education and society and seeks to divine a way out of South Africa's deeply held prejudices, to see whether South Africans can 'live beyond the destructive appeals of their exclusionary pasts and whether they can imagine a future in which the value of being human is primary' (p.4). This has been designated the national question of South Africa; the country's 'master signifier'(p.6) is still race, 'held up and invoked explicitly and implicitly-the often ineffable "elephant in the room'" (p.6), even though apartheid is apparently over. The subtitle of the book, Unlearning the Logic of Race in the South African School, contains the concept that is, Crain Soudien argues, at the heart of 'our becoming fully human' (p.7).
The book is approximately divided into the more theoretical chapters 1-3, which discuss the 'history and [ ] content' (p.28)...