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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Social Scientists as Policy Makers: E.G. Malherbe and the National Bureau for Educational and Social Research, 1929-1943
Author:Fleisch, Brahm DavidISNI
Year:1995
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:21
Issue:3
Period:September
Pages:349-372
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:research centres
sociology
educational research
Bibliography/Research
History and Exploration
Education and Oral Traditions
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637249
Abstract:This paper examines the history of the South African National Bureau for Educational and Social Research from its founding in 1929 until the publication of E.G. Malherbe's 'The Bilingual School' in 1943. It considers the founding of the Bureau, its organizational location and major activities in relation to major themes in the larger social and educational context of interwar South Africa. It explores a number of major research projects that were undertaken by the Bureau in the 1930s including social research on the 'poor white problem', African education, IQ testing for policy purposes, educational measurement, and bilingualism. It argues that the founder of the Bureau, the American-trained social scientist Ernest Gideon Malherbe, brought a very specific conception of the politics of knowledge to his work at the Bureau. Malherbe believed that social science should be developed to serve the 'public interest', and that the public interest was best informed by social science research. In the process, the relationship between intellectuals and the State would be substantially transformed. Malherbe's particular conception of the politics of knowledge, although effective in the context of the early 1930s, became a contested terrain by the early 1940s. Notes, ref., sum.
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