Chapters in Books (Curriculum Studies)

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Afterword
(SUN MeDIA, 2012) Leibowitz, Brenda
Earlier this year I attended a conference in Götenburg, Sweden, on integrating language teaching into the disciplines – nothing overtly to do with social justice or the public good. One evening after a long and tiring day mulling over the conference proceedings, a group of conference goers, including two from South Africa, one from Spain and one from the United States, settled down for a drink and a (hopefully) frivolous conversation. The conversation soon became serious. We talked about South Africa and apartheid and the past; about Spain and its right-wing dictatorship; and about the United States and resistance to the Vietnam war. Each of us expressed our strong feelings about the injustices in our own countries that we had to endure and grapple with somehow. We found ourselves comparing our attitudes towards these ‘pasts’ with those of the younger generation that had been born after these periods of extreme injustice. Some of our children or students were interested in what we had to say, but sometimes they resisted this ‘harping on’ about the past. In South Africa the term ‘born frees’ has been coined to discuss the lives of young people born since apartheid ended.