 On this topic of marginalising working-class learners while trying to give them an advantage, we learnt more from Penny Vingevold of the Joint Education Trust and CISA-Shongwei of the Khau Teng Education Department. It is often said that many black learners tend to underperform because their own experience of the world is simply not represented in the planned curriculum. John Gueltig took this up with Penny and CISA. One of the reasons why black kids not in South Africa only but worldwide tend to underperform is because their knowledge, their experience isn't represented in the curriculum. I think very often the response then of people is to say, okay, let's put a lot more of the experience of black kids in the curriculum. So you have things like black studies or you have ethnomathematics. I think that the jury's out on that one. I certainly think that there's emerging evidence in the United States that that further marginalised black kids. Can you give us an example of that? Well, you know, I think that the people over the years where that has been introduced, it hasn't really taken. And whether it's because parents are reacting against that and saying, well, that's not middle class. That's not what the whites are doing. But certainly parents and kids are demanding to do the central thing. That's the Gramscian point. Did you want to do what is middle class knowledge that's going to get you the jobs? I go back to what I was saying is that the way through that might be with the kinds of knowledges or the experiences that inner-city kids have had. But you don't leave them there. You don't say that all you're going to have is black studies. You know, you've got to go move on to world studies as well. Even if black studies is the route to which you get the destination. I would agree with that last part. The fact that if we're talking context, making use of context that occur in areas of experience of particular learners, fine, mathematics problem, making examples of things that are very close to learners. But I still feel that the concepts themselves transcend all that. If you look at numbers and the way in which we globally deal with numbers, those concepts, they remain the same. And hence the experience of America that the minority people felt is still a student. What you seem to be saying really is that what teachers do need to do is create an experience in the classroom that isn't alienating. People must identify with the curriculum, but that doesn't mean you must change your curriculum goals. So your curriculum goals must still be some sort of universal understanding of the world, of universal principles, and not just specific local contextualized ideas, although that might be the route through which you move to get there. You see, like I can use an example from language and communication. I was very moved this week by somebody who had been through the very awful bunch of education experience. And now I wanted something different to his children. He comes along to OBE and his child gets taught that she's going to be taught communication. And all she's done so far is oral work. Now, if African culture means oral work, I say put a stop to that immediately. We all need the beautiful, beautiful stories, all of us of our culture. But we are in a literate and highly reading and writing dense world now. If you're going to say to me, I'm going to now make sure that I teach the short story genre through Indebelli, Bessie Head, and European writers. Then I say, write on, that's it. But because you want to bring every South African should be reading the Indebelli short stories. But that requires sophisticated reading levels and thinking skills. And I think that's what Cézanne is saying. Let's keep the endpoint in view and make the kinds of the content a little bit more relevant. But let's not drop our goal. Finally, though, we need to remember that no matter what the prescribed curriculum specifies, the life circumstances of learners will greatly influence how much is learned and the quality of that learning. The learner's life chances and work choices will probably also differ considerably depending on the learner's life circumstances at home and at school.