Decolonial, social justice and values education in South Africa lean on Ubuntu harder than evidence allows
Introduction
Three agendas have been running through South African education debate for a decade or so, mostly side by side. Decolonising the curriculum came to a head in the university protests of 2015 and 2016, and Le Grange (2021) still frames the discussion around those years. Social justice is the older and quieter one, written into post-apartheid language about redress and access (Themane, 2021). Values education sits in the school curriculum, where the National Curriculum Statement for Grades R to 12 is described as a values-driven policy even though what it means to equip learners with values has never been pinned down very well (Ajayi, 2023). Put next to each other, the three look as if they should reinforce one another. In practice they keep reaching for the same word, Ubuntu, and that is where I think the trouble starts.
This paper argues that Ubuntu has become a convenient shared vocabulary for decolonial, social justice and values education in South Africa, and that the evidence that it does the work asked of it is much thinner than the enthusiasm suggests. The conceptual case is reasonably well made (Abdi, 2021; Ngubane and Makua, 2021). The school-based evidence is small, qualitative and boxed in by overcrowding, family circumstances and uneven policy (Khathi, 2021; Nkambule, 2023; Moodley, 2025). Critics, for their part, ask whether Ubuntu describes anything real in modern African societies at all (Adeate, 2022). The paper looks first at how the three agendas overlap, then at what Ubuntu pedagogy actually claims, then at what teachers and managers report, and finally at the limits and critiques, before taking a position.
Three agendas, one vocabulary
Start with decolonisation, because it is the loudest. Themane (2021) argues that curriculum change should be the first point of departure, and the reasons given seem less about adding African content than about who gets into knowledge in the first place. The article makes three claims: the size and shape of the higher education system follow political interests and market forces more than social justice or decolonisation, the rules for selecting and sequencing content are still structuralist, and historically disadvantaged students do not yet have real epistemic access. That is a conceptual argument about universities, and it is worth keeping in mind that nobody tested it with data in that article. Still, it shows how quickly talk about decolonial content turns into talk about access and conditions, which is the territory social justice has always claimed (Themane, 2021; Ngubane and Makua, 2021).
Le Grange (2021) pulls the same debate in a very different direction. For him decolonising the university curriculum is a matter of individual responsibility, something each person works at through the autobiographical method of currere, in repeated cycles of unlearning and relearning. His conclusion is a bit uncomfortable for anyone hoping for a finished programme. Even people leading decolonial work keep absorbing coloniality, so nobody gets to declare the job done. Set beside Themane’s structural reading, this suggests two quite separate theories of change sitting under one label. One expects reform of rules and systems, the other expects slow work on the self, and a school or university can easily be doing the second while the first stands still (Le Grange, 2021; Themane, 2021).
School-level evidence on the decolonisation agenda is scarce. Moodley (2025) asked 20 school managers in primary schools about their experience of curriculum decolonisation, using a mixed-methods design with unstructured questionnaires, and concluded that curriculum transformation has not moved at the pace needed and that several goals set at the start of democracy remain unmet. Twenty respondents cannot speak for the system. What the study can do is record that people running schools experience decolonisation as an unfinished policy goal and not as a settled change in classroom life. That fits the picture in Themane (2021) of a sector whose structural features have shifted less than the rhetoric, although the two studies work at different levels of education and should not be stretched into one finding.
Social justice, finally, tends to enter these discussions as a value to be taught and as a condition to be met, and the two are not always kept apart. Ngubane and Makua (2021) tie Ubuntu pedagogy to equity, recognition and fair participation among students from different backgrounds, which leans towards recognition as much as redistribution. Themane (2021), by contrast, is worried about epistemic access, and that is closer to a question of who is actually in the room and on what terms. Neither is wrong. The difficulty is that a pedagogy aimed at recognition can look finished long before access has improved, and the finding of unmet goals in Moodley (2025) hints that this risk is real rather than hypothetical.
What Ubuntu pedagogy promises
The philosophical case for putting Ubuntu at the centre is respectable. Abdi (2021) lines Ubuntu up against Paulo Freire’s educational thought, arguing that both are concerned with humanisation, with the idea that a person becomes a person through other persons, and with action on the world to change it. The overlap, he says, can be identified analytically, and the pedagogical connections follow from it. This is a paper in educational philosophy and it makes no claim about classrooms in any particular country. Even so it matters, because it gives Ubuntu a place in a recognised tradition of critical pedagogy instead of leaving it as a vague cultural gesture (Abdi, 2021).
Ngubane and Makua (2021) take the step into South African higher education. They combine Collective Fingers Theory with Social Justice Theory to propose what they call Ubuntu pedagogy, offered as an alternative to teaching built on European theory. In their account, classroom practice would be organised around students’ cultural competencies and their several language repertoires, and every student would be treated equally and with dignity whatever their background. They also suggest it could introduce non-African students to Ubuntu values and help African students reconnect with their own cultures. All of that is attractive. It is also a literature-based paper with no classroom observations, surveys or learner outcomes behind it, so the claims about what the pedagogy would achieve are best read as hopes (Ngubane and Makua, 2021).
The nearest thing to evidence from schools comes from Nkambule (2023), who looked at how heads of department show Ubuntu values in curriculum leadership. The study was small: nine teachers, three from each of three schools in three circuits of Emalahleni in Mpumalanga. The heads of department were seen using democratic, autocratic, transactional, transformational and managerial styles alongside instructional leadership, and the participative and transformational styles were the ones that best expressed Ubuntu, improving curriculum delivery and knowledge sharing among teachers and between them and their heads. Two things stand out. Ubuntu here is a way adults treat each other when they plan and share lessons, which is not quite the learner-facing pedagogy that Ngubane and Makua (2021) describe. And the autocratic and transactional styles were still there, so Ubuntu looks uneven in practice, at least in these schools (Nkambule, 2023).
Taken together, these three sources show how the idea changes shape as it moves. In Abdi (2021) it is a philosophy of personhood. In Ngubane and Makua (2021) it is a set of teaching principles for lecture halls. In Nkambule (2023) it is a leadership habit among heads of department. Nothing says these are the same thing, and a policy that adopts Ubuntu as a catch-all may be asking schools to do three different jobs under one name. That is my reading rather than something any of these authors claims, and it deserves testing before anyone writes it into a framework.
Values in the curriculum and in the classroom
Values education has an official text to work from, which decolonial pedagogy does not. Ajayi (2023) treats the National Curriculum Statement as values-driven but imprecise, and uses the Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy of 2001 to read what equipping learners with values might mean. He lists ten constitutional values, among them democracy, social justice and equity, equality, non-racism and non-sexism, Ubuntu understood as human dignity, accountability, the rule of law, respect and reconciliation. His reading is that the curriculum philosophy amounts to nurturing and instilling those values through subject content. So Ubuntu is one value among ten in the policy text, and not the foundation of the whole structure that some decolonial writing makes it (Ajayi, 2023; Abdi, 2021).
The worked example is what makes the paper interesting, and also what makes it shaky. Ajayi (2023) analysed the Natural Sciences Senior Phase and Life Sciences Grades 10 to 12 policy documents and linked topics to values. The biosphere, for instance, is tied to social justice because living things share a space, and to Ubuntu because they depend on one another. It is a clever mapping. It is also, on the face of it, a single researcher’s interpretation of two documents, with no classroom data to show that a teacher would teach this way or that learners would pick the values up. Whether a Grade 10 class would ever see interdependence among organisms as a lesson in human dignity is basically unknown (Ajayi, 2023).
When teachers are asked directly, the picture gets more earthbound. Khathi (2021) held focus group interviews with 25 teachers from five public schools in KwaZulu-Natal, using Kohlberg’s theory of moral development as the lens. Teachers’ own perceptions of values education shaped how they integrated it, and role modelling by teachers and parents came out as central. What got in the way was not a lack of curriculum philosophy at all. It was overcrowded classrooms, single-parent households and social media, and the recommendations were practical: closer cooperation between school and parents, professional development from the Department of Basic Education, and counselling psychologists in schools (Khathi, 2021). Ajayi (2023) mentions that teachers are often blamed when learners do not absorb positive values, and Khathi’s findings point to conditions that go well beyond the teacher.
One more observation. Kohlberg’s stages are a staple of Western developmental psychology, and they sit awkwardly beside an Ubuntu account of morality in which personhood is relational (Abdi, 2021; Khathi, 2021). The study does not claim Ubuntu as its framework, so this is not a flaw in it. It does show how values education in South African schools can be pursued with tools quite unlike the ones decolonial writers recommend. If the policy conversation wants Ubuntu to inform values teaching, it will have to say what that changes about methods and assessment, which neither the document analysis nor the teacher interviews attempt to do (Ajayi, 2023; Khathi, 2021).
Where the critiques bite
The sharpest challenge to the whole project is philosophical. Adeate (2022) responds to the claim by Matolino and Kwindingwi that Ubuntu has come to an end, a claim based on its failure in practice and in theory in modern African societies. Adeate reads this as part of Matolino’s wider scepticism about Afro-communitarianism, the view that attempts to ground postcolonial African philosophy in it overstate how useful it is in practice. The paper suggests the sceptic’s stance works as a prompt to match advocacy to an accurate understanding of how such ideas operate in reality. For education, the implication is plain enough. A curriculum that leans on an idealised Ubuntu may be building on a description that nobody has checked against how people live, and the school-level studies in this paper do not settle the matter (Adeate, 2022; Nkambule, 2023).
Ndlovu (2023) offers a second, quieter warning from inside the decolonial camp. The systematic review of literature across eight databases argues that pre-colonial African communities held both tolerant and negative views of disability, that colonial powers centred the negative ones, and that harmful myths survive, such as beliefs linking body parts of people with albinism to luck. The article then proposes that Ubuntu be used to restore the humanness of people with disabilities and that African proverbs about tolerance of disability be written into the curriculum. The proposal is sensible on its face. What it quietly concedes is that indigenous knowledge has to be selected, since some of it harms the learners decolonisation is supposed to serve, and somebody has to decide which parts count. The review also notes that the search terms mostly returned deficit framings of disability, so the review itself shows how much of the literature leans one way (Ndlovu, 2023).
Add up the evidence and the gap is plain. Abdi (2021), Ngubane and Makua (2021), Themane (2021) and Adeate (2022) are philosophical or conceptual. Ndlovu (2023) is a literature review, Le Grange (2021) is one scholar’s autobiographical method and Ajayi (2023) is a document analysis. The only studies that put questions to people in schools are Nkambule (2023), Khathi (2021) and Moodley (2025), and between them they heard from nine teachers, 25 teachers and 20 school managers, so 54 people. None of them measured what learners came to value, know or do. That does not make the larger claims wrong. It does mean the weight placed on Ubuntu pedagogy by policy talk and by academic writing rests on arguments far more than on observation.
There is a South African wrinkle worth adding. Much of this literature comes from higher education, while the values-education and school-management studies come from basic education, and they rarely cite one another. A claim about Ubuntu pedagogy in a university classroom (Ngubane and Makua, 2021) cannot be carried over to an overcrowded KwaZulu-Natal high school (Khathi, 2021) without evidence, because the conditions differ so much. At the same time the school studies suggest the constraints on any of these agendas are material and relational before they are philosophical: crowded rooms, absent parents, a pace of change that principals call too slow (Khathi, 2021; Moodley, 2025). Themane’s (2021) point about epistemic access probably applies at school level too, although his article does not test it there.
A defensible position
My position is that Ubuntu is worth keeping in these debates as an ethic of relationship, and that it should not be asked to carry the whole of decolonial, social justice and values education. As an ethic it has support. Abdi (2021) shows it has company in critical pedagogy, and Nkambule (2023) found heads of department who could use it in how they led colleagues, with some benefit to knowledge sharing. As a total programme it has very little behind it. The three agendas need separate tests: decolonisation by whether curriculum rules and student access actually change (Themane, 2021), social justice by who participates and on what terms (Ngubane and Makua, 2021), values education by what teachers can do in the rooms they have (Khathi, 2021).
Three practical things follow from the sources. Policy documents should say what each value means in teaching, since Ajayi (2023) found the philosophy of equipping learners with values imprecise enough that it needed outside text to interpret. Decolonial work should treat selection of indigenous content as a matter for open argument and not as something settled by invoking tradition, as Ndlovu’s (2023) review implies. And researchers should collect learner-level evidence, however modest, because the existing studies stop at teachers’ and managers’ perceptions (Moodley, 2025; Nkambule, 2023). Le Grange’s (2021) reminder that nobody finishes decolonising applies to the research agenda as well.
Conclusion
Ubuntu has become the point where decolonial, social justice and values education meet in South Africa, and it has earned some of that position. The philosophy is respectable and a few school studies suggest it can shape how colleagues work together (Abdi, 2021; Nkambule, 2023). But the evidence for Ubuntu as a classroom pedagogy is basically conceptual, the values policy it sits inside is vague, and teachers describe obstacles that no philosophy removes (Ajayi, 2023; Khathi, 2021). The critics add that Ubuntu itself may be less settled in lived life than its supporters assume, and that indigenous knowledge needs choosing with care (Adeate, 2022; Ndlovu, 2023). Where the evidence leaves things is a sensible, unfinished position: keep Ubuntu as one resource, put structure and access back at the centre, and measure what learners actually gain before claiming the work is done (Themane, 2021; Moodley, 2025).
Reference list
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