My name is Pagiel Joshua Chetty, a current Masters candidate at the University of Cape Town. I am currently working full time as an educator in one of Cape Town’s most prestigious schools, Rondebosch Boys Preparatory School. I am the youngest born in a family of five. I am happily married and have been blessed with one of the cutest son’s ever to be born in November.   

After matriculating in 2006 from Piet Retief High School, I decided to take a gap year (which turned into three years) as I was unsure of what I wanted to study. It was during this time that I was exposed to the noble profession of education and its positive effects in low income communities across South America. I returned to South Africa, armed with a ‘Paulo Freirean/Henry Girouxian’ vision of liberating the oppressed through a progressive and reformist pedagogy focused on the public good. 

After completing my Bachelors of Education through UNISA, I was able to further my studies by enrolling for an Honours degree in Education Management, of which I graduated Cum Laude.    

My research interests are education, policy studies, systemic injustice, the public good, and the effects of Neoliberalism and Capitalism on Education. These interests all stem from my lived experiences: being the first person of colour to be accepted as a student in my previously ‘white only’ primary school, being able to travel around the world exploring new cultures post-matric, and experiencing the education system in all its various forms and modes across South Africa and the World. 

My desire is to make a valuable contribution in the education sector by being an upstanding and brave reformer who is focused on seeing the success of those who have been marginalized, forgotten, used and abused by an education system (sometimes willingly, other times unknowingly) that perpetrates injustice and inequality.