American Influences on the Development of Social and Educational Research in South Africa, 1929-1943.

The United States influenced the origins, elaboration, and implementation of the politics of knowledge between social science and policy in the South African National Bureau for Educational and Social Research. Divided into six sections, the historical analysis of the Bureau: (1) examined the context within which the Bureau emerged, the origins of the new paradigm, and the organization of the Bureau; (2) looked at the first major study in the new paradigm; (3) explored the Bureau's role in intelligence testing; (4) examined the efficiency surveys in African education; (5) studied the Bureau's involvement in educational measurement; and (6) evaluated the Bureau's bilingual survey and its consequences. Established in 1929 as an informal information gathering and research division within the South African Union Department of Education, the Bureau became the center of the development of a new relationship between social science and policy in South Africa. Four years after the Bureau's foundation, its potential influence increased with a substantial grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (United States). The foreign funding enabled the Bureau to sponsor, conduct, and publish social science research as well as build a national library on education and the social sciences. Although temporarily closed in 1940 for the duration of World War II, the Bureau continued to exert influence on South African policy until its incorporation into the Human Sciences Research Council in 1969. As the director of the Bureau, Dr. Ernest Gideon Malherbe pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to policy oriented social science research in the Carnegie Poor White Study. (Author/CK)