Education, Part 8
Progress and Conflict
The writing of this Communist
University course on Education was planned for years. Actual preparation took
more than a year. It was rolled out for the first time in early 2013. Naturally,
the struggle in education has continued. In the first iteration, there was
reference to current conflicts within education at the time. The course would
not be able to trace every topical event. But there will need to be some sort
of update or editing of the topical material.
Up to this point, we have managed
to tackle the main theoretical load that the course must carry, and continue to
carry, in its successive annual re-presentations on one of the four CU channels.
We have looked at theories of
mass public education such as N F S Grundtvig’s “Schools for Life”, an idea
that survives in the form of the Danish folk-high-school movement; Paulo
Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”; and the Cuban “Universalisation of the
University”. We have seen, through Lenin’s eyes, that all education is
political. We have seen how the political conflict plays out in the realm of
conventional theories of formal education, and through Jean Lave’s eyes, we
have seen the relevance of Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach, among others. We
have understood, through Mike Cole’s, Andy Blunden’s and Lev Vygotsky’s eyes,
that the conceptual separation of schooling from life is a mistake, and that
the development of people is one historic and revolutionary process.
As with previous Communist
University courses, the last parts of the course on Education have been
reserved for the more current “problematic” facing South Africa, in the light
of the theoretical review that is comprised in the earlier parts. Not for the
first time in the CU courses, we found last year that life had conspired to
dramatise the matters under review, and that a real-life crisis presented
itself at the same moment as we arrived at consideration of the potential for
conflict.
On the 5th of
March 2013, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) called for
Minister of Education Motshekga’s resignation, and announced its intention “to mobilize all our members for an
indefinite strike as a response to the assault on collective bargaining, our
basic right as workers and to promote quality public education.”
On International Women’s Day
(8th March 2013), at a special event in Katlehong, Ekurhuleni, SADTU
launched a Campaign for Quality Public Education. This was a potentially
revolutionary move by the organised educators in SADTU to redefine education
qualitatively, so that it can respond to South Africa’s historical need for
popular development, as opposed to the narrow school curriculum dictated by the
bourgeois imperialist hegemony that has still not released its long-term grip
on South Africa’s educational system.
In the latter respects,
SADTU’s intentions are in keeping with the ANC’s January 8th
Statement of 2013 (attached), which in turn reflects the transactions of the 53rd
ANC National Conference that took place the previous month, in Mangaung. The
January 8th Statement calls for major, integrated, educational
initiatives. It also declared the Decade of the Cadre, and declared 2013 to be
the year of unity-in-action towards socio-economic freedom.
Among the initiatives mentioned
in the 2013 ANC January 8th Statement were these:
• Internal
education of ANC members, politically, generally and academically
• Literacy
and general education of the community led by the ANC at local level
• Assistance
by ANC-led volunteers to the formal-education schools in the localities.
• Expansion
of access to education, including to Further Education and Training (FET)
Colleges
• Commitment
to the development of indigenous languages and to their use in schools
If it had proceeded nicely,
the ANC’s programme was capable of growing into the kind of co-ordinated
raising of political and general culture of the nation that we would want to
see in the light of the first seven parts of this course on Education. But
instead, within days, there was conflict between the Minister of Basic
Education and the organised educators. There was a massive one-day protest
against the Ministers’ threats, in April, in Pretoria, organised by SADTU. This
checked the Minister but it did not finish the conflict. SADTU called for the
resignation of the Minister, and of the Director-General.
An SACP 2013 statement came
out plainly in favour of education for liberation: People’s Education for
People’s Power! SADTU took up the banner of Quality Public Education, showing
willingness to lead, in a revolutionary way, in this field.
We will, this time, continue
to use the same 2013 documents that were previously used in this part, but we
will add the extensive section on education from the ANC’s 2014 national and
provincial election manifesto, as a separate 4-page leaflet. We will attach,
and make available by download, the following documents:
• ANC January
8th 2013 Statement
• A
Compilation of SACP, SADTU and ANC statements from February and March 2013
• Extracts
on Education from the 2014 ANC National and Provincial Election Manifesto
The next item within this
part of the course looks at several visions of how the development of education
can be managed for “quality”, in the bourgeois sense, derived from the trading
of commodities, of semi-static standards or grades; and also qualitatively, in
the revolutionary sense of qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, change.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: ANC January 8th Statement,
2013, Compilation of
SACP, SADTU and ANC statements, February-March 2013, and Extracts on Education
from the 2014 ANC National and Provincial Election Manifesto.
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