Constitutional Law (CSL2601): Assignment 2

Constitutional Law (CSL2601): Assignment 2 Due date: 8 May Question 1 You are an excellent law student. You have been offered an opportunity to work at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, assisting Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. The Court has recently heard an important matter relating to the decolonisation of higher education and you have been asked to write parts of the judgment that the Court will deliver. Read the essential extracts of the judgment below and then provide the information that will complete this draft judgment by writing the relevant paragraphs on the issues contained in questions 1.1 to 1.4 below. Feel free to rewrite whole paragraphs or use information from some paragraphs when writing your own paragraphs (answers). 1.1) It is clear that the Constitutional Court is concerned with educating the public about the role of constitutional law in ensuring a strong democracy that is aligned with the South African context. Therefore, you now need to link constitutional law to the decolonisation of law. With a specific emphasis on African customs, traditions or philosophies, explain how constitutional law should be interpreted and understood in a decolonised or Africanised way. Case law and other appropriate authority must be used to illustrate what you mean. (7) Paulo Freire, one of the world's foremost authorities on education theory and practice once acutely captured the act of side-stepping responsibility in a crisis when he stated that "washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." Frere, more than any other thinker around education is most relevant in our local context because most of the former liberation fighters at the helm of our society formed their notions of pedagogy praxis from sentinel writings such as pedagogy of the oppressed, pedagogy for liberation and We Make the Road by Walking, which provided the roadmap to tackling illiteracy, forcing open the doors of learning and making education relevant to the needs of developmental states born out of post-colonial struggles. How disturbing therefore that the lessons taught by Freire and others who have been at the coalface of changing oppressive paradigms through bold and innovative action have not been heeded in South Africa. It is specifically pertinent because the premier liberation movement came to power with the promise, embedded in its freedom charter, that "the doors of learning and culture shall be opened." The truth is that since democracy there has been increased access and that the ANC government built schools and universities, and has made significant progress in hacking at the discriminatory and unjust foundations of what was basic and tertiary education under