A quarter of a century ago the Soweto student rising marked the beginning of the end of Afrikaner rule. The students rebelled because they did not want Afrikaans imposed on them in school. Seen as the vector of apartheid, the language of the local masters, instead of opening on to the wide world, enclosed them in an airless capsule of confrontation.
Afrikaans, however, was not the main problem; it was merely the last straw. The students were fighting an integrated system of schooling specifically designed for servitude. They did not want to be programmed for subaltern skills. They did not want to have identities engineered for them by anthropologists; they wanted to say themselves who they were and would like to become, and not be told.
They did not want to submit to “traditional” authorities, or to have an alien version of their history thrust on them; they wanted to rely on their own memory and historical knowledge. Bantu Education was aimed not at emancipating them but at concealing a strategy of which they were to be the instruments and the victims.
One day we may not have to tell this all too familiar story any more. Until then, we will have to remember that apartheid was not all that exceptional. It was not simply a local aberration, but rather a particularly virulent form of an overall ill. Anthony Richmond* pointed out almost a decade ago that our globalised world, with its prosperous Blankestans, its indigent Bantustans, and multiple gradations of dependency and poverty, has normalised the system that (carrying out in his small-time province Hitler’s grandiose but abortive project) Hendrik Verwoerd pioneered.
The Old South Africa was acting on behalf, in a way, of the wealthy West, which was less offended by its policies than by its lack of tact. The people of South Africa rebelled, and became the first to try to free themselves from the apartheid towards which the whole world has been gravitating. Few have really tried to follow their lead.
Noam Chomsky* demonstrates impressively, using (like Richmond) a vast array of authorised texts, that on the whole purportedly benign educational institutions foster this global anti-development. Worse still, they have clearly been designed to serve this purpose.
In the Enlightenment tradition, Chomsky sees history as a struggle between absolutism and democracy. Today’s so-called “liberalism” is a hoax, a label designed to hide the alliance of corporate business and the authoritarian state to fetter the freedom of markets and individuals. This “corporate mercantilism”, rooted in “the power of corporate entities that are totalitarian in internal structure, increasingly interlinked and reliant on powerful states, and largely unaccountable to the public”, has globalised the structures of the Third World. It is invading and regimenting all aspects of our life. It is also generalising a “colonial model of education”.
The function of this education is not emancipation and empowerment but mind-control. It indoctrinates and demobilises. Schooling is part of a cultural policy that makes the privatistic ideology of the “Free World”, “Western Democracy” — and their concomitant consumerism — seem “natural” despite evidence to the contrary. It helps to take over public spaces (for example, the media), to fill them with a “string of empty-minded shows [that] distract people from understanding their real problems…” and to propagate the myth that “the West” has now achieved a classless society, in which conflict is merely incidental. It censors information and inculcates the “big lies” that make real freedom and democracy seem irrelevant and unrealistic.
Teachers form part of the middle management of this culture. Chomsky calls them “commissars”. In exchange for junior membership of the nomenklatura — with holidays and access, for example, to economy-class international travel — they instil the “doctrinal system”. As in every nomenklatura, their interests are entirely private, while put across as public and social. Teachers tend to privatise the human resources they are supposed to develop in the interests of society. They dilapidate, sterilising time and space. School, which was supposed to civilise, in fact surreptitiously fosters the rough beast that slouches across screens and headlines, arousing programmed dismay in the money-muzzled media.
Educational policy in the “new South Africa” has been courageous. Insofar as the persistent territorial segregation has allowed it, apartheid is being dismantled. Black schools are being upgraded; white schools are being opened to all. Syllabuses have been revamped, in line with democratic thinking. Fact is being put back into history and fiction dismissed. Curriculum is being designed to build up abilities instead of merely transmitting token “knowledge”. Much has been done; more will no doubt be accomplished. The system is one of the most ambitious in the world.
Changing anything at all in education is already an accomplishment. Change has usually been resisted by teachers — poorly paid to do a demanding job, they tend to cling to habits and minor privileges, and to make use of their cultural and political clout to bring fearful parents and politicians into line.
This has proved a difficult obstacle in almost all other countries, yielding only when threatened with privatisation and exposure to “market forces”; South Africa has tried to avoid this. But though educational policy is discarding the heritage of local apartheid, global (or “market”) apartheid has not yet been confronted. It still seems “normal”.
At the height of the French Revolution, a prophetic voice came from a suburban madhouse: “Français, encore un effort si vous voulez vraiment étre libres!” The Marquis de Sade was writing not merely about sexual freedom, but about freedom tout court: “Make a further effort if you really want to be free!” Political freedom, he implied, must be translated into “real freedom”: freedom from poverty, homelessness, and ignorance, of course; but also from the rules and regulations that plague everyday life; and from all arrangements that close the world to us instead of opening it up. For Sade, sexual freedom was the touchstone of these concrete freedoms.
Debate on the place of pleasure in civilisation, a permanent issue in France since the 17th century, has recently revived. A series of films and novels — in particular those of a remarkable (if erratic) young writer, Michel Houellebecq* — have made a cost-benefit analysis of globalised Western civilisation. The result is alarming. Unlike the spoilsport authorities who try to govern and improve them, the spunky French people remain convinced that pleasure is a good thing (even if only in texts), and is worth fighting for.
But how? Until the root repressiveness has been eradicated, the mad seer explained, revolutionary accomplishments remain in jeopardy and can become mere tokens of political correctness. His prophecy has come true. “Revolution” has become an empty term. “Pleasure”, it would seem, is following suit.
Today, the root evil is still apartheid, its global update — and its concomitant cultural programme: Global Bantu Education.
What can be done to fight it? First of all, according to Chomsky: teach the truth. But what is the truth? At this point we have been trained to get up nervously like Pontius Pilate and leave the room before Jesus can answer his crucial question. The truth? A mystery enveloped in an enigma, or vice versa: an embarrassing term. In the dark, we do our best to sneer.
Yet there is nothing abstruse about the truth, says Chomsky: “There is no more reason now than there ever was to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws, [and] not simply [by] decisions made within human institutions …” For all practical and political purposes (and all purposes are practical and political in the last resort; theory merely covers unavowed interests) the truth is simply the sum of ascertainable facts and probabilities and their relationships. This may be complex, but with patience it can be figured out. Chomsky shows us how to do it: “The best way to help students to learn is to allow them to find the truth by themselves … True learning comes about through the discovery of truth, not through the imposition of an official truth.”
Objective truth? Well, this has become a moot point. George W Bush denies that there is global warming because it has not been “objectively proved”; he dismisses the idea as merely “subjective”. Yet though it cannot be conclusively proved it is clearly credible enough to warrant serious attention. Conversely, the so-called “objectivity” of doctrinal tenets is only objective to a common sense that has been formatted by the dominant “bizcult”.
To educate students is to help them emerge from ideological confusion. For example the confusion, current in South Africa, over the role of the state. The state still claims, as in the bad old days, to represent its citizens and (like “business”) to know what is best for them. Yet South Africans should know better than most that state control does not and cannot mean social control (they are learning the same lesson about business control).
Society is not really represented by the state; if it is represented, it is only approximately, by means of a crude arrangement, admittedly a big step forward in its day, that has cornered exclusive use of the label “democratic”. Absence of subsequent progress has drained this tired term of most of its meaning. Like “revolutionary” and “liberation”, “democratic” is now fit only for advertising copy.
Meanwhile, it squats on the space in which credible alternatives could emerge. Cooperatives, for example, are a good deal less amenable to incorporation into global apartheid. Yet despite their giant economic stature in countries like Italy, Germany and France, they remain political dwarves, “not really democratic”.
In South Africa unions and “civics” were developing a remarkable political alternative. But their organisers have since given up key positions in society for prominent posts in the progressively discredited state and subsequently business. This leaves us with the choice between state and business, public and private, nice cop and nasty cop in cahoots with one another. It deprives South Africa of possible ways forward.
Can education take over, and pursue the pioneering path? It is a field in which the groundwork has largely been accomplished: Bantu Education I is a thing of the past. Can its sequel, BantuEd II, now be avoided? Can emancipation and empowerment be resumed? They must, if “education” is not to become yet another wistful word.
* Anthony H Richmond Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order (1994); Donaldo Macedo (ed) Chomsky on MisEducation (2000); Michel Houellebecq Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les Particules elementaires (1998), Plateforme (2001)
Donald Moerdijk is a South African-born academic who lectured mainly in France, at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. He also lectured in Canada and, for two years in the 1990s, at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is retired