OPINION

Uproar over 'segregated' Curro school

Decision to place six white children in single predominantly black Grade R class condemned by SA's leading racial thought leaders

An Eyewitness News (EWN) report alleging that Curro Foundation School in Roodeplaat was practicing racial "segregation" has provoked a racial uproar on social media on Thursday. The controversy follows the school's decision to place the only six white children, in its initial English-language Grade R intake, along with some twelve other black children. The other two Grade R classes were, as a result, made up of only black children.

According to EWN a group of thirty (black) parents signed a petition demanding "to know why some classes are made up exclusively of black children, while white pupils are kept together. They say separating children at such a young age perpetuates racial and cultural segregation and stunts the nation's transformation."

The article quoted André Pollard of Curro Holdings, the JSE-listed company which owns and runs the school. as saying "that in some grades they have a very small number of white pupils who they try and keep together in one group. He says once they have 12 or more children, they divide them equally into classes. ‘It's not because we would like to segregate the whites, it's just because of friends. Children are able to make friends with children of their culture'."

The school's failure to distribute these six white children evenly across three classes (i.e. two in each class), and instead place them in a single racially integrated class (where they still constituted a small minority), was widely condemned by many of South Africa's most prominent racial thought leaders.

Eusebius McKaiser, Oxford Rhodes Scholar and columnist for the Iqbal Survé group of newspapers, slammed the school as disgustingly racist for "racially segregating" children in this manner:

He also condemned Pollard for his comments:

He then lambasted Pollard's presumed racial ancestry:

Before going on to condemn "racists" for seeing race when segregating children in this manner, while demanding colour blind policies.

He added:

Dr Nomalanga Mkhize, a top Rhodes University historian and BDLive columnist, also condemned the school for apparently trying to preserve the "Purity of White Children":

She added:

In a follow up comment she said she did not want to send her daughter, who is currently in crèche, to a white school.

The businessman, writer and photographer, Victor Dlamini, condemned the school for practising "classic Apartheid":

He said the justifications used were insulting:

And added:

A number of other commentators weighed in. Nic Spaull, the Stellenbosch University education policy expert, commented on his blog:

"With a history such as ours how can a school possibly argue that separating children based on race or ‘culture' is necessary?! The sheer nerve that their regional manager can justify this racial segregation saying that children find it easier to make friends with children of their own culture is astounding and shameful."

The humourist Tom Eaton tweeted:

The CEO of Curro Holdings, Dr Chris van der Merwe, told Politicsweb that following the initial intake, a week or so ago, another six white children had enrolled in Grade R at the school. These children had been placed in the other two (formerly all black) classes.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines segregate as to "put apart from the rest, isolate; enforce racial segregation on (persons) or in (community etc.)" and segregation as "segregating or being segregated; enforced separation of different racial groups in a community etc."

Throughout the apartheid period (1948 to 1990) in South Africa state schools were strictly segregated by race. As of the time of publication Politicsweb was unable to establish how many classes in whites-only government schools, in 1962 or after, were predominantly made up of black pupils.

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