The application of political decision survives both in the education field as outside it. Frequently, it is more pronounced when it is observed conflicts between the directions taken and the results obtained, normally perceived as great betrayals. As a background for this issue, we considered the capacity of policies to bend under the "force of things", that is, the weight of economic and social determiners or what is presented as such. The political change that took place in South Africa in 1994 is at the origin of a debate in the country on whether the decisions made aiming at eliminating the discriminations inherited from the past in terms of access to education adopted 10 years later or in effect. We attempt to analyze "the force of things" through the official data available for the Western Cape Province. Our study had three main concerns: firstly, determining the amplitude of racial segregation at school after the apartheid period, find out the weight of the underlying social determiners and their racial differences, the persistence of strong social inequalities in the access to education, and finally question the capacity of the political machine to control and to what extent this "force of things", which probably expresses both the heritage and the workings of the South African society currently under the effects of globalization and the perpetuated by the associated social-economic inequalities.
Educational Policy; Racial Segregation; Social-economic Inequalities
