There have been a number of calls recently to intensify local and community participation in school education. Teacher unions, education MECs, the ANC, committees of enquiry as well as research projects have expressed the need for greater opportunity for local structures and organisations to play a role in the strengthening and transformation of formal education at school level.
Usually such calls are based on the formation of a body or organisation by means of which the views and opinions of community members can be heard by government officials and functionaries. So there is the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union’s call for “local education committees”, the recommendations by the Ministerial Committee on Rural Education for the involvement of “broader school communities” and the outcomes of research into the roles and impact of community education forums and community language and literacy groups.
Similarly, the ANC’s national executive council’s education and health sub committee is being urged to promote the building of education committees at local level.
At its 2007 conference in Polokwane, the ANC resolved to mobilise communities to participate in education: “Education must be elevated from being a departmental or even a government issue to a social issue”.
Now mobilisation is more than the setting up of bodies to ensure representative community involvement in the educational processes and practices in local schools. There are already school governing bodies, the election of which is the third biggest voting process in South Africa, which are charged with mediating state policy in individual schools. And each secondary school has a representative council of learners. But when there is talk of community involvement in schooling, it supersedes the involvement of only parents in school matters and it transcends attention to individual schools. Here the entire educational concerns of a village, a suburb or settlement are included.
What might these broadly representative community bodies do? Their focus could range, for example, from ensuring that all school-age children attend school regularly to confronting the question of the links between local and school forms of knowledge; in other words, they become involved in the contestation over the curriculum and its implementation.
A democratically constituted community organisation mandated with improving and uplifting education in the entire community will need to incorporate the different kinds of leadership in each community as well as the interests of parents and caregivers in addition to the range of civil society organisations active there. And such a body will need to be linked to structures that deal with health, safety, transport and other social and educational concerns as well as having to deal with vulnerable children.
But such local education bodies should not be limited to material arrangements or to the organisation and deployment of resources. For example, if a community wishes to hold an event that celebrates the accomplishments of people through reading, writing, storytelling and other aspects of literacy and numeracy, that would not be sufficient in itself. Though likely to excite and encourage some community members to engage in activities that promote literacy, such events will need to be incorporated into and assimilated by that community as part of its normal, humdrum and daily habits and routines if there is to be significant development in that community’s ability to engage with its contemporary context.
Democracy cannot take root through the mere existence of representative figures or organisations, no matter how democratically they were elected. Such elections should be one outcome of a society in which citizens participate fully, in which human rights are scrupulously observed and sustained, where many points of view are advanced and discussed, where sufficient information is available and where members of that community know how to express their opinions and views. Education is an ideal realm in which to engage with matters of this kind.
As distinct from parents, what can communities do with and for schools? To answer that, a quick reference is necessary to what kinds of education communities, both urban and rural, habitually provide for the young.
Families (parents, adults and care-givers) offer intensive cultural and social education to children, including the complex processes of language development. Within the larger context of neighbourhood and village, the young are inducted into ceremonies, customs, beliefs, attire and forms of public behaviour.
And lest there is misapprehension on this point, traditional forms of behaviour are often more strictly observed and inculcated in African cities than in the country areas, precisely because of the intense heterogeneity in urban areas. Simultaneously, urban-based cultures develop as well.
So identity, cultural orientation and memory are established in young people well away from those agencies of state policy, the schools. And this is what young children bring to the classroom.
No matter how poor they are, communities are capable of making available to schools resources which are often overlooked and disregarded. But that can be frustrated by the desire of many educators to keep the world at bay so as to teach. Each and every community has within it people with manifold skills, abilities and experience which could be used beneficially in the formal education of the young.
For example, people trained to heal and protect have much to teach about substances, plants, practices, mental health, states of being and about the nature of the body and the mind. They should not be used only to warn, cajole and stress danger and risk. But the incorporation of local knowledge into formal education is not a matter of mere content. Equally important is how that knowledge is organised and codified as national and international intellectual currency.
The current school curriculum and the impulse towards the democratic development of communities (for that is what community engagement with education implies) point in precisely the same direction – towards certain kinds of agency in people that enable social action on the basis of choice and informed conviction shaped by critical attention to issues.
The hard question at the moment is whether communities and educators are capable of working towards the goal of democratic development of society. Some research is beginning to suggest that, handled appropriately, community education bodies can have a markedly valuable impact on the relations between communities and schools, the attitudes of teachers towards parents, the willingness of parents to support teachers with information and assistance, and the desire of adults to improve their levels of literacy. Here forms of mobilisation appropriate to community involvement with schools begin to take shape.
One such research project has its focus on literacy and numeracy for entire communities, but this research is not conducted by experts in literacy who truck in loads of materials and equipment. If communities consent to participate in the research project, they take up responsibility, for example, for driving the campaign for literacy and numeracy. They draw up a programme of action. If there is an emphasis on learning to read, then the community has to ensure that reading material is available.
How they do that is their prerogative, be it through fund-raising, the extension of library services or donations of newspapers to schools. But this cannot and should not be an exercise in charity; not on the grounds of some moralising notion of having to earn what one gets, but because this process is about harnessing and directing energies and about discovering and using possibilities.
Such community mobilisation puts schools into a new and different perspective as they are then no longer accountable only to the educational district or circuit and hence the province. Schools become accountable to the community at large as well as to the educational authorities and that brings the three dimensions together: the community, the school and the state.
No longer, therefore, will there be that subservient relation between principal and staff towards “the department” that issues instructions and advice. The new factor, that of “the community”, has to be incorporated into that network of educational interests and requirements, obligations and expectations, and this new element must affect the nature of the relationships between learners, teachers, parents, community members and education officials. The presence of a powerful and energetic community organisation that attends to education will also have an impact on the power relations in every community.
In one participatory research project, the community organises big issues such as setting up adult basic training and education centres, Saturday schools and information-gathering towards campaigns to encourage the literacy and numeracy of community members in support of schools.
But a note of caution is needed here. It will be in vain to advocate something like family reading circles with the cosy assumption that every home is a middle-class dwelling with electric light, a powerful heater in winter and sufficient leisure. Working class and rural families do not and cannot live on these terms.
The campaigns at community and provincial levels must take socio-economic realities into account. Unemployment and manual labour, poverty and the sheer struggle for survival leave very little time and energy for activities such as these. This is why the programme of educational action should be decided finally by the representative community organisation.
This account touches on instances of what is implied in enabling communities to play a greater role than they do at present in matters of education. And this account argues in favour of such participation by communities as an aspect of the democratic development of South African society.
Michael Gardiner is a senior researcher at the Centre for Education Policy Development in Johannesburg