Changing Class: Education and Change in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Edited by Linda Chisholm (Human Sciences Research Council)
To edit a collection of articles that seek not simply to review but also to offer an analysis of education change and developments in South Africa over the past decade is no easy task. Linda Chisholm has succeeded in doing this with remarkable finesse. While the depth of analysis and detail offered in each article is somewhat uneven, and this is to be expected in a book of this length, the unevenness is not spectacularly so.
The contributors are both local and international and most convincingly demonstrate their expertise in their field. Sadly, there is no contribution of an individual from a historically disadvantaged institution, and the usual ‘elite” institutions, such as the universities of Cape Town, KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg), Witwatersrand and Pretoria, once again take centre stage.
The text covers the significant areas of education policy development implementation in South Africa in the past decade and is organised into three sections. The first, Changing Contours, looks at the education system and its ‘interaction with wider social change”. Here the overarching issues of education equity, quality, decentralisation, and the social and political challenges embedded in change imperatives are addressed.
Of interest to the wider society is Edward Fiske’s and Helen Ladd’s account of how the school fee system came about and some of the consequences thereof.
One of the important consequences they indicate is that, while race may have been the fundamental organising principle in the past, school fees have now become the mechanism through which parents select the schools their children attend.
That the issue of fees is a complex one is borne out in Jane Hofmeyr’s and Simon Lee’s article, which dispels the simplistic notion that all private school fees are exorbitantly high and draws attention to the existence of private schools that cater for students who cannot afford the fees of the public schools accessible to them.
The second section, Changing Landscapes, deals with what Chisholm refers to as the ‘stuff of education” and the focus is on the classroom and the day-to-day issues of teaching and learning and being an educator. While much anguish, fervour, harsh criticism and excited anticipation have surrounded the literature on curriculum changes in South Africa in the past decade, Ken Harley and Volker Wedekind offer a sober and well-researched account of curriculum developments and point to an important lesson thereof for South Africa: our enthusiasm for a ‘vision of what should be has undermined the ability of policy to consider seriously what is”. The value of this point, I believe, is not that we should be limited by what is, but that the old adage of educators, that we use what is known to proceed to the unknown, may be useful.
The final section, aptly titled Changing Margins, covers issues that often sit on the margins of government priorities. Three significant areas, inter alia, covered here are early childhood education (ECD), adult basic education (ABE) and the development of a severely marginalised and unemployed sector of our society, namely, the youth. Kim Porteus argues that a broad perspective on ECD options and packages, particularly those that could potentially address learning needs among the poorer sections of society, need to be considered by the government.
The majority of articles draw on both legislative frameworks and historical contexts and developments to describe particular areas of change. In particular, the piece by Haroon Bhorat, The Development Challenge in Post-Apartheid South African Education, is good.
Using data from the October Household Survey of 1995 and the Labour Force Survey of 2002, Bhorat shows that ‘economic growth has disproportionately managed to create employment for more educated individuals”, while there is a simultaneously high level of unemployment of South African graduates. The recognition he makes, that there should be some synchronisation between both the quality and quantity of the labour supply and the demands of labour, is a useful one given the analytic frame that Chisholm signals in the introduction of the text: that human capital theory is an inadequate driver for the reconstruction and development of post-apartheid South Africa.
A provocative piece is that of Crain Soudien, Constituting the Class: An Analysis of the Process of Integration in South African Schools, in which he demonstrates an admirable awareness of language and writing and an intense consciousness of the exigencies in thinking about the changes that do take place and how we perceive such changes.
In drawing attention to the varied identifiers of class (the only article in the collection to do so), and the almost inevitable and normative use of race as a lens through which we understand difference in the South African context, Soudien makes what I believe is a valuable point: that the reconstruction of education is about social reconstruction, and if this is so, then the ways in which we perceive and understand society should be nuanced by the complexities of our society and not by the simplified organisers of race, gender and economic class.
Johan Muller’s article, Assessment, Qualifications and the NQF in South African Schooling, deals with issues of assessment that may resonate with both politicians and educators. Aside from Muller’s inimitable style of a linguistic minimalism that succeeds in making a profound point, a style that he uses to good effect in such a technical piece, I found that he makes a point which balances well with the interrogation of ideology that Soudien raises and which is also given central attention in Chisholm’s introduction.
In clearly describing the pro-testing and anti-testing positions, Muller evokes one of the dualisms that underpin this text — the demands of the market and the supply of education. While the market may call for a detailed assessment of the capacities of the labour force, ‘education progressives”, as Muller calls them, continue to resist what may be deemed to be normative testing that are likely to expose class and race differentials in extreme ways. And this, I suggest, is the nub of this text.
The strength of this collection is, I believe, that it is not simply an educational text. It is also a political one.
There is unequivocal acknowledgement that the contributors use the analytic framework of human capital theory to write the achievements in South African education thus far.
Wisely, she explains the fundamentals of human capital theory. ‘Human capital theory posits that improving individual educational attributes will lead to economic growth … The concept is usually applied in a manner that removes from the analysis of national education systems their history, social and economic content, complexity and interrelatedness with socio-economic and political structures, processes and struggles.”
She goes on to say that the authors in this text wish ‘to demonstrate the flaws of such an approach by engaging in a full social analysis of education which takes its historical roots seriously”. By and large, I think the text achieves this goal remarkably well.
That the articles are rooted in a historical and contextual analysis of South African education, that there is appropriate conscious of the dissonances between political aspirations and implementation imperatives, that the writers show expertise in their field of analysis and that there is either tacit or explicit recognition of a neo- liberal agenda embedded in the education changes taking place in the past 10 years, bears testimony to the stated purpose of this text.
In collating these articles to achieve a measure of unity of analyses (and indeed she succeeds in doing this despite her acknowledgement that all the chapters do not employ the same approach), Chisholm argues that the major conclusion from the book ‘is both simple and dramatic: Educational development and the emerging system have favoured an expanding, racially mixed middle class.” I have no argument with this conclusion — the papers do indeed show this.
My contention lies in Chisholm’s, and indeed the text’s, stance, or shall I say lack of stance, on the issue of class. That she explicitly states that ‘[n]either this introduction nor the author’s tries to provide a definition of this middle class” is not a convincing redemption.
In the first instance the introduction alone makes numerous references to class as do a number of the articles. With the exception of Soudien’s article, which draws attention to the complexities of the notion of class, there is no elucidation of a term that forms the core of the conclusion of the text. Not surprisingly then, the term at one level seems to imply a simplistic economic determinant of class and as such silently draws on classical Marxism.
Yet I suspect that none of these authors are classical Marxists. And on another level, the term is used to imply certain patterns of behaviour that seek to protect dominant forms of culture. More significantly, the title of the text, Changing Class, signals the centrality of class to the intellectual project on hand.
I believe that the intellectual and political project of this text would have been enhanced if a point made by Belinda Bozzoli 20 years ago, albeit guardedly, in Class, Community and Conflict, that class cannot be understood as a reified category and that the relationship between class, identity and social action should constitute a basis for social analysis, had been given attention.
The singular strength of this text is its bold assertion that neo-liberalism has not fulfilled, and probably cannot fulfil, the redress and poverty alleviation challenges facing this country. But therein lies its weakness, too. While it is decisive in its analysis of the past years it does not adequately open the debate for the future.
Its silence on the notion of class obscures the complexities of struggles yet to come.
Venitha Pillay is a senior lecturer in the education faculty at the University of Pretoria