Participants were asked about their experience of teaching controversial issues in schools, either when they were attending school themselves or as part of a teaching practice. One South African tutor contrasted the present with the 1980s when he was at school at the height of the struggle against apartheid: I was a Marxist. I read Trotsky, Lenin, Marx… it was a period of heightened political awareness when everything was being questioned, though this was despite of apartheid schooling, not because of it. Now it’s much quieter, as if the big change has already happened. Interestingly, and by contrast, another tutor who went to school in neighbouring Lesotho at the same time noted that there, ‘issues of race and gender were silenced. It was academic knowledge based on curriculum which lacked relevance to the lives of the learners… learning in school seemed like a fiction’. The same tutor remarked that he saw little teaching of controversial issues when he supervised teaching practice in schools, either by the student teachers or by teachers themselves, a point reinforced by other tutors. One factor in this was, he suggested, that the students themselves had not experienced the discussion of controversial issues in their own schooling.