Education that works in the real world.

Walk into almost any school in South Africa and you will find the same thing: a curriculum that was not designed for the children sitting in front of it. The names may have changed. The textbooks may have been updated. But the underlying logic — whose knowledge counts, whose way of knowing is legitimate, whose history is worth teaching — remains largely untouched.

Decolonising curriculum is not about removing content and replacing it with something else. It is about interrogating the assumptions that decided what should be there in the first place.

In practice, this looks like a teacher in a Grade 4 class in Durban who stops mid-lesson and asks: why are we measuring this shape in centimetres and not in the units my grandmother used to measure fabric? It looks like a history lesson that does not begin with colonisation as though nothing existed before it. It looks like a reading list where the children can find themselves — not as problems to be solved or communities to be developed, but as people with full and complex lives.

None of this requires a complete curriculum overhaul before next Monday. It requires a shift in orientation. It requires teachers who are given the space — and the professional development — to ask better questions about the material they are delivering every day.

The hardest part of decolonising curriculum is not the politics of it. The hardest part is that it demands intellectual honesty. It asks educators to examine what they were taught, how they were taught to teach it, and whose interests that system served. That is uncomfortable work. It is also the most important work in African education right now.

The classroom is where this becomes real. Not the policy document. Not the conference. The classroom.

There is a particular kind of anxiety that shows up in early childhood education — the anxiety that children are not being taken seriously unless they are sitting still, facing forward, and completing structured tasks. Play, in this framework, is what happens when the real work is done. It is the reward, not the method.

This is not only a misunderstanding of how young children learn. It is a misunderstanding of what learning is.

Decades of developmental research — from Piaget and Vygotsky to more recent neuroscience — consistently shows that play is not the opposite of learning. It is the primary mechanism through which young children build cognitive frameworks, develop language, practice emotional regulation, and make sense of the world around them. Play is how children think.

In play-based classrooms, children are not passive recipients of information. They are active constructors of knowledge. They are hypothesising, testing, failing, adjusting, collaborating, and communicating — all of which are the foundations of higher-order thinking.

The challenge in many African contexts is that play-based learning has been positioned as a Western import — a luxury that well-resourced schools can afford while serious schools focus on outcomes. This framing is both inaccurate and damaging. Play is not a pedagogical preference. It is a developmental necessity. And it is one that many African children, who learn through story, song, movement and social interaction from birth, are already arriving at school prepared for — if we would only let them use it.

The question is not whether we can afford play-based learning. The question is what we are losing by replacing it with something that looks more serious but produces less.

Ask the leadership team of almost any private school in an African city what they are trying to build, and you will hear some version of the same answer: a school that is world-class, globally competitive, and internationally recognised — while remaining grounded in local culture and values.

The problem is not the ambition. The problem is that most schools are treating these two things as if they are in tension, and the result is a school that achieves neither particularly well.

International credibility has come to mean: Cambridge or IB curricula, English as the language of instruction, Western pedagogical models, and league tables measured against British or American benchmarks. Local rootedness has come to mean: a token cultural day, some Zulu or Swahili on the timetable, and a mission statement that mentions Africa.

This is not integration. This is layering.

The schools that are doing this well — and they exist — have understood something different. They have understood that being globally credible does not mean being globally identical. That the skills, dispositions and knowledge that prepare young people for the world are not owned by any single education system. And that African children who are deeply grounded in their own contexts, languages, histories and ways of knowing are not less prepared for the world. They are differently and often more richly prepared.

The starting point is not curriculum reform. The starting point is a leadership team willing to ask honestly: whose vision of excellence are we chasing, and is it the right one for the children in front of us?

That question, taken seriously, changes everything that follows.