Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy (JAEP)
Volume-2 | Issue-04 | 269-279
Review Article
South Sudan’s National Curriculum Framework (2014): A Critique of Change
Joseph Ladu Eluzai Mogga
Published : Aug. 30, 2018
Abstract
This theoretical paper uses document analysis to probe South Sudan‟s new
National Curriculum Framework (2014) as an official text and its implications as a
change agenda with a view to arriving at a perspective about the task of the school in
the world‟s newest country. The study notes that the country‟s curriculum change
policy seeks to enact a curriculum model that provides both equality and quality with a
pedagogic philosophy that is humanistic in essence, transformative in outlook and
historical in perspective. The new model shifts from subject-specific to generic
curriculum that offers more student choice, relies on environment and accentuates
social and life skills in a broader milieu of competencies. The new arrivals on the
subject scene are information & communication technology, vocational education &
enterprise, and values education in the form of environmental sustainability, life skills
and peace studies to consolidate civics and cement the country‟s diverse society.
However, the facility of the Framework to promote inclusive education is constrained
by its design possibilities and the practical realities of school education in South Sudan
as its official launch date of 2019 approaches. The scope for broader learner experience
beyond conventionality will remain largely rhetorical or even inimical in as far as the
resources for emancipatory practices are held back by the dual force of curriculum
novelty and state priority. The prospect of wide gaps between planned, delivered and
experienced curriculum is, therefore, real and vexed. It remains to be seen if the
Ministry has a strategy at all to deal with any eventual knock-on effect. The fact
remains, too, that the Framework is heavily prescriptive in nature and as such could
potentially prove counter-productive to teacher agency with drastic consequences for
local teacher appraisal practices. Thus, implementing a new curriculum short of
resources and through the political doldrums of shifting timelines is principally an
unmitigated disaster. It could lead to a tacit rejection of curriculum change, more out of
repulsion than upon reflection. The fortunes of South Sudan‟s National Curriculum
Framework (2014) are thus defined; and the broader discourse of reform duly confined.