At the time of the campaign to create the Freedom Charter, the Bantu education system had just been introduced. Volunteers were urged when campaigning for the Congress of the People to link the collection of demands to pressing grievances of the people, amongst others, that of Bantu education.

Since 1954 inferior systems of education, modelled on Bantu education, have also been introduced for coloureds and Indians. At the same time the content of white education continues to encourage racist attitudes and to discourage any sense of fellowship with black South Africans.

It is well known that the rejection of gutter education for a democratic educational system has now become a central arena of popular struggle. The apartheid government cannot meet the people's demands. The government's educational “reforms” have been unequivocally rejected by the broad mass of students and parents. In fact, in the present economic recession the apartheid government does not even have the means to patch up gutter education sufficiently to continue its own limited “reform” initiative.

In consequence of the continued rejection of this system, students have moved beyond protest. They have, more, and more advanced their own vision of a democratic, equal, non-racial educational system. While such a vision is found in the Freedom Charter, the Charter's treatment of education is by no means comprehensive.

The Azanian Students Organisation (Azaso), Congress of South African Students (Cosas), National Education Union of South Africa (Neusa) and the National Union of South African Students (Nusas), democratic organisations affiliated to the UDF, have embarked on a project to create an Education Charter. This Charter does not seek to supplant the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter states basic principles and it makes particular demands. Some of these demands reflect the time when the Charter was written (though this is less true of education, than say Southern African affairs).