What should be in the South African higher education curriculum has been a subject of continuous debate for almost 50 years. The debate has resonances with and has been informed by the discussion in the United States about what the average graduate should be taught and should know. Leading the charge in the USA is Eric D. Hirsch (2001), the spokesperson for a group of academics calling themselves the ‘core knowledge’ movement:

Hirsch's critics (Coles 2014) have described his curriculum as ‘a hegemonic vision produced for and by the white middle class to help maintain the social and economic status quo. It deliberately fails to consider the values and beliefs of any other particular race, class or gender.’

Similar contestations have characterised the South African discussion. At several points over the last 80 years radical scholars and activists inside and outside the university have raised the question of ‘dominant knowledge’ and its role in the production of inequality and particularly racial oppression. Two texts produced in the 1950s by Ben Kies (1953), The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation, and Isaac Tabata (1959), Education for Barbarism, powerfully raised the question about the need for approaches to education that were culturally inclusive. During the 1970s and 1980s the campaign for what was called ‘People's Education’, drawing on Freierean and popular understandings of education posed the challenge sharply to the legitimacy of ruling class approaches to knowledge (see Motala and Vally 2002). From these provocations and from prolonged debate and argument inside the academy, interestingly, has emerged almost 40 years of innovative strategies and initiatives.