Grade 9

The curriculum statement is from the Department of Education for the year 2008.

Knowledge focus

The knowledge focus for achieving the Learning Outcomes in Grade 9 is reflected in:

History

  1. Human rights issues during and after World War II:

    • Nazi Germany: How did the Nazis construct an Aryan identity? How did the Nazis use this ‘identity’ to define and exclude others? How and why did the Holocaust happen? What choices did people have in Nazi Germany?

  2. The end of World War II and the struggle for human rights:

    • United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (including crimes against humanity);

    • United States civil rights movement;

    • human rights and anti-colonial struggles in Africa.

  3. Apartheid in South Africa:

    • impact of World War II;

    • What was apartheid?;

    • How did it affect people’s lives?;

    • repression and resistance to apartheid in the 1950s (e.g. the Defiance Campaign, the Freedom Charter and popular culture);

    • repression and the armed struggle in the 1960s;

    • divide and rule: the role of the homelands;

    • repression and the growth of mass democratic movements in the 1970s and 1980s: external and internal pressure;

    • building a new identity in South Africa in the 1990s: pre-1994 negotiations, the first democratic elections and South Africa’s Constitution.

  4. The Nuclear Age and the Cold War:

    • Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the changing nature of war;

    • ideologies: capitalism and communism;

    • United States vs. the Soviet Union as superpowers: the arms race, conflict over territory, the space race;

    • the collapse of communism;

    • the collapse of apartheid.

  5. Issues of our time:

    • dealing with crimes against humanity: apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission compared with the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials;

    • xenophobia and genocide (e.g. Rwanda, the Balkans);

    • the effects of globalisation on Africa.

  6. A new vision for Africa: Africa’s economic recovery.

 

Read the topics for: Grade 9