Toxic mix. Graeme Bloch
education system in South Africa. It is a precondition for being sure that we can build a better tomorrow.
Education as it stands today continues to reproduce inequalities in society, inequalities that threaten the stability and comforts of all young people. It is true that these inequalities, and uneven power relations, grow from or originate in divisions and problems in the wider society. These inequalities, the marginalisation and exclusion that is created and reinforced, hold back many from looking ahead to a better shared tomorrow.
Most children find that the education system fails them, penalises them and almost rationalises their ongoing exclusion from the fruits of democracy and change. Education seems to reinforce inequality and shuts children out rather than being inclusive in its aspirations and effect. This is because education is embedded in society, is part of the complex social transitions and inequalities in the first fifteen years of democracy. These in turn were institutionalised well before democracy and are a part of what the democratic state inherited.
Education always reflects the wider society; it cannot but be a part of all the problems and achievements of a particular society, whether under colonialism, apartheid or democracy. A divided, greedy, cruel society will never be changed by its education system alone.
Nonetheless, education has its own dynamics too. Above all, its stories and claims of access for all, of the liberating power of knowledge and reason, mean that education will always do more than just reflect society. Education can also change society. Slowly, not always in dramatic ways, knowledge and learning can be a force for change and freedom. This force can be very fundamental and can make an impact on the basic values of a society. Education always carries this contradictory aspect: it conveys the values and concerns of a given society at a point in time, but at the same moment education holds the potential to go further than where we are, to transcend the given and imagine the new.
Identifying the fault lines
Much has been done in the first fifteen years of democracy. There have also been drastic mistakes, such as overambitious curricula, unconsidered teacher retrenchments and the failure to adequately mobilise the enthusiasm and skills base in civil society, to mention only a few.
This book is not about ‘getting the balance right’ between positive and negative criticism or about a ‘balance sheet’ assessment between good and bad policies. It is rather about identifying the weaknesses and challenges in the schooling system so that we can work smarter to fix them. It is about understanding the context, being sensitive and sympathetic to the realities and inherited limitations that make education change more difficult than we might wish.
It is also about showing clearly where it is that things are going wrong so that the appropriate interventions can be implemented. It is about focus and drive, about priorities and outcomes, and about the place of each reader in contributing to getting things right. Understanding how the system works, and how it got to where it is, can never take away the fact of human agency as the ultimate determinant of what happens.
The book will approach issues in a systematic way, to take the readers through the arguments and to examine the assumptions as we go along. The context is vital. It is important not to be flip or superficial about problems or to fall back on easy prejudices. There are so many factors at play that it pays to take things slowly, examine them carefully and make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle are in place.
The next chapter will set the scene by looking at the development of black South African education in context. I will look at the history of schooling for blacks in some detail. I will choose selected periods that set the basis for understanding the institutions of educational importance and how they worked. First of all, I will examine education in traditional society, to make the point that African society before colonialism had ways of passing on knowledge, values and skills. These were especially appropriate to the societies of the time and their needs. Formal schooling only came later.
The missionaries were the first to provide education to blacks in a systematic way. Many of the historic schools established by the missionaries are remembered with fondness as centres of excellence and achievement that played a significant role in training the leaders of the liberation struggles to come – schools such as Healdtown (1857), Adams College (1853), Lemana (1906) and Tigerkloof (1904).
But the church contribution has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, missionaries provided modern western (industrial) schooling that helped ensure advance and integration into colonial society at certain levels; on the other hand, the missionaries were also the forerunners of colonialism as it undermined traditional African society. A combination of conquest and new social divisions as capitalism and gold mining transformed South Africa helped put paid to the autonomy of African societies.
Mission schooling was to become a particular target of the Nationalist Party in 1953 as it introduced Bantu Education, which used education specifically as a weapon to ensure a cheap labour force with no rights, and to achieve the goals of segregation in South African society.
The rest of Chapter 2 engages the introduction of apartheid education, its impact, the spread of cheap mass education for blacks, and the fires of resistance that were fanned by these apartheid plans in education. In 1976 the schools exploded in open defiance of segregated education; by 1980 and the mass democratic struggles of the decade, schooling and education struggles were at the centre of resistance as part of the broader forces for change. Teachers, students and parents fought for People’s Education under the banner of the National Education Crisis Committee (NECC). This resistance and its achievements are the source of much debate, with some arguing that this was what created the anarchy and instability found in many schools today.
The chapters that follow the historical context leap straight into the contours and challenges of post-apartheid education. How is the education system performing? In Chapter 3 I examine and present evidence to show the many achievements, but also the multiple failures, in education today. This is not just a dry series of education statistics, but an analysis or diagnostic of what is going wrong.
What are the key blockages and failures in the system? How do we organise our understanding of these facts so that we know which key things are causing problems? There is a combination of factors, a toxic mix of causes that come together to keep black education in a state of disrepair. It is a fatal and complex mix of in-class or classroom failings – many related to teachers – combined with poor administration and support around the school, as well as societal factors that together conspire to hold back learners’ potential and close down opportunities.
Government and government policy surely cannot escape blame or responsibility for this. Chapter 4 will look at what government has done wrong and how actions and policies have compounded rather than resolved some of the multiplicity of problems. In any case, whatever their intentions and achievements, government programmes are clearly not hitting the ground in a forceful way; there is no critical mass that is driving changes through. Progress is painfully slow and unacceptably incremental. Progress in some areas is often countered by setbacks in others because there is little synergy driving overall towards clearly improved outcomes.
While this book tries to avoid playing the blame game, responsibility still has to be located somewhere. Understanding the context and the causes, being empathetic to the range of difficulties, still does not let officials and teachers off the hook, to be very specific.
Chapter 5 will look at what is being done to address the problems. At many different levels, there are incredible people and programmes that show the way and provide models of what might work. It is amazing to see the many successes and the many people and institutions in education working to make things better. Looking at the good things in education is not meant as an exercise to make us feel better, or to put on rose-tinted Pollyanna glasses. It is to try to find models and approaches that can work.
Chapter 6 suggests how we should build the roadmap ahead, and Chapter 7 tries to propose actions that can be performed by different stakeholders to take us forward. We need a set of practical proposals to help us intervene and contribute to processes of education improvement. We also need a clear national plan and an agreed set of priorities around which to work, so we can slot in our efforts in a loose framework