Re-engineering sociological constellations for higher education in South Africa

Abstract

Higher education in South Africa has experienced a number of challenges for the past three decades: from the days of apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa, to the challenges of transforming the higher education landscape. The merger of several South African higher education institutions in 2004 created a plethora of challenges to add to the already existing ones. These challenges were political, sociological, structural and fiscal in nature. The desire to address these challenges has in a way created an epistemological backlog where access to higher education has increased drastically but epistemological access remains a challenge. These amongst other things fuelled the decolonisation movement which demanded for the decolonisation of knowledge. However, the decolonisation of knowledge amongst other things cannot be effective or complete without a re-engineering of the sociology of education. this chapter articulates a pathway for the re engineering of the sociology of education by articulating four sociological constellations.