Three Horizons of Education
School Introduction - 1st session
This is an introduction to the first session of the joint SADTU/SACP
political school, to be held from 2nd to 4th June 2010 at The Lakes, Benoni, sent in advance, with links to supportive reading material (see further general notes on the school
at the bottom of this post).
The programme has been re-designed following a
request that provision should be made for “breaking up into workshops”, and
re-convening as a “plenary”. This has been done, and the new programme will be
published shortly. Nevertheless, the event remains a school, and not a
conference. There is no basis here upon which the “plenary” can resolve on
anything or bind any structure to its decisions.
For each session, a basis will be offered in case the
school should wish to “break up into workshops”. These will tend to be
divisions into three, with a potential fourth that would work on the overview
or synthesis of the other three. This will be the case here, in this first instalment,
having to do with education. There will be three “problematisations”, followed
by a fourth part that problematises the synthesis of the other three.
The first session, then, is about education, at three horizons.
The first
horizon is that of the present school itself. What is it doing? What is its
aim? What is its pedagogical method?
The second
horizon is that of the country and also the continent of Africa. It asks
the question: How? How is political education to be extended to the nation and
to the continent?
The third
horizon is that of national policy on education and the actual practice of
SADTU members.
Finally, there is the synthesis of these three into
one.
First horizon
This school is attended by top leadership of the
SACP and of SADTU. It must be set up to challenge and to extend this top cadre
and thereby to prepare those attending to be effective actors in the middle of
revolutionary changes. Consequently, the school must locate itself at the
frontier of revolutionary theory and practice, where guides are few and fully-developed
experts are non-existent.
In this terrain we need pedagogical theory and
methodology that is adequate to our revolutionary purpose. The most advanced such
theory and practice is the “critical pedagogy” of the late Paulo Freire, and
his followers.
This pedagogical theory conforms with long-standing
communist study-circle practice, where one comrade “opens the discussion”,
problematising the matter in question. In the ensuing debate, leadership may
come from any quarter. Dialogue is expected to create a socialised knowledge,
and not commodified, individual expertise. Learning is treated as continuous,
with little or no attempt at “closure”. Decisions are taken in constitutional
structures, of which an ad hoc
political school or study-circle cannot be one.
The loudest lip-service is paid to Paulo Freire by
those who have the least intention of conducting themselves in a Freirean
manner. The problem confronting those who would promote this revolutionary
educational practice, therefore, is the constant warfare that is conducted against
it, which in the first place employs deception and sabotage, and afterwards,
blatant destruction. All educationists, including those from the world of
politics, are conflicted, precisely in the manner described by Freire in “The
Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. As much as they preach, so to that same extent do
they fail to liberate. To the extent that they liberate, so to that same extent
does their authority disappear.
Problematisation
Freire describes how the road to educational hell (i.e.
the reproduction of oppressive relations), is paved with good intentions of “upliftment”.
A sophisticated pedagogical theory is required to defeat this tendency and
still preserve the subjective freedom of the educator, and Freire provides just
such a theory. Yet the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” can itself be subverted if
we are not vigilant.
This school offers three texts as background
reading on basic revolutionary pedagogy:
Second horizon
Here we consider how to extend revolutionary
political education to the South African nation and beyond, to the boundaries
of the African continent.
In the first place this task is going to require a
methodology that is replicable. This school of ours is a laboratory in that
respect. It contains elements that are replicable and others that are not
replicable.
The expensive venue and the travelling costs of the
participants to this school are elements that are not widely replicable.
The reading material, on the other hand,
transmitted by e-mail and/or printed in booklet form, available around the
country, in advance of the school, is a form of propaganda that is very much
replicable. Printing costs of material for this three-day course are projected
to cost less than R100 per participant.
Thus, what is arguably one of the most important
components of political education, is actually one of the cheapest. (Not
forgetting that any text is no more than a stimulus for dialogue, and therefore
that the gathering of people is in itself the most crucial resource).
The extension of political education must be a
dialogical “movement”. It must constitute a “republic of letters” conducted
through all available media, whether advanced, like e-mail and Internet, or
established , such as hard-copy print media, or hybrids of these two, such as “Print-on-Demand”.
The roll-out of a national and continental
dialogical movement of revolutionary political education may be conceived of in
two parts.
The first part is enabling. This includes the firm adoption of a revolutionary
pedagogy; the secure possession of an expanding archive of source material; the
establishment of lines of communication; and the preparation and communication
of ready material that can be used as a basis for educational dialogue.
The second part is the work of organising study circles in all parts of the country and the
continent. At the local level this means the establishment of a regular
programme on given dates at a certain time and venue. It means the constant announcement
and communication of these details to an ever-widening circle of contacts. It
means the onward deployment of cadres formed in political education, to action
stations in the mass organisations of the revolutionary struggle.
In short, political education becomes a revolutionary
transmission-belt. It moves people via education to organisation and
mobilisation, or in other words, to action.
Problematisation
As a way of problematising this question of
extension of political education beyond the present school, one may ask: How
can I set up a long-lasting weekly study circle? What minimum inputs will it
require? Can it be sustained by the resources of the participants? If not, why
not?
Political education that is not sustainable within
the resources of the political community will be open for manipulation by those
controlling the resources. This is why the technology of propagation (for
example e-mail, booklets, and Print-on-Demand) becomes a political question.
This school offers three texts as background
reading on the propagation of revolutionary pedagogy:
Third horizon
The third horizon is that of national policy and
practice of education in South Africa.
By this is meant the political role of education in
society as it is presented to the national polity.
An exhaustive discussion of educational theory and
practice will not be practically possible in this school, notwithstanding the
presence of distinguished leadership of SADTU, unless the other general
political questions are to be dropped.
The question of education as it appears in mass
debate through the mass media and to a great extent in the deliberations of the
African National Congress in particular is largely treated as utilitarian and
quantitative as opposed to politically qualitative.
In terms of the individual, education is widely
accepted as being the process of commodification of human labour-power for the capitalist
market.
At the aggregate level, “skills training” or skills
acquisition is commonly presented as a greater imperative, and therefore a
greater good, than education. This paradigm is not only built into capitalism,
but is also built into developmentalism.
The sense of education as human political development
falters and fails in this environment because it cannot be conceived of as a
quantifiable “outcome” and therefore cannot easily be funded or operationalised
within the same framework as the utilitarian provision of “skills”.
At the same time, the education system in South
Africa is clearly failing to provide “skills” that would commodify all
individuals to a level suitable to and advanced productive economy, or a “knowledge
economy”. According to the bourgeois newspapers,
the education system cannot even manage to produce sufficient commodified
candidates for the job-opportunities that are available.
This situation drives discussion back to the political
aspect of education. In practice, the contradiction between education as political
practice, versus education as utilitarian bourgeois process, can never be put
to bed.
Problematisation
The problematisation of this part of the session on
education is therefore the question of whether the state education system can
ever be used to transmit revolutionary political ideas.
To put this in terms that correspond to Freirean
pedagogy, the question is whether state schooling can contribute to the
development of a collective mass revolutionary Subject of History, and whether
such a kind of schooling could ever co-exist with the powerful and
contradictory existing practice of commodification of individuals through the
state education system.
Not the least part of this problem is the powerful
subjective motivation of a dominant part of the school pupil population, and
their parents, towards “qualification” for the capitalist labour-market, even
in the face of unemployment of qualified people including university graduates.
Consequently, the public dialogue around education
contains mixed messages.
To characterise this contradiction, this school offers
two texts to help stimulate discussion. These are both addressed to the ANC (in
“ANC Today”) by ANC government ministers. The one from the Minister of Higher
Education is more political. It projects an image of the future leadership of
the South African polity as such. The one from the Minister of Basic Education
is thoroughly programmatic, hardly questioning the underlying assumptions of
bourgeois state education, and relying quite heavily, for example, on the
provision of a billion rands-worth of pre-printed workbooks. These examples are:
Synthesis
As SACP and SADTU, we may wish to consider how the
state education system, the organised cadres of educators in the form of SADTU,
and the political formations of the liberation movement including the ANC,
SACP, YCL and ANCYL could all be aligned to provide a continuum of
revolutionary political education.
Consider: At present, sixteen years after the “democratic
breakthrough” of the 1994 universal-franchise election, the political movement
that gave birth to that political victory remains an unresourced volunteer movement
coexisting with but not touching the machinery of capitalist reproduction in
the sphere of education.
The democratic teachers’ union’s members are employed
to propagate the essentials of bourgeois society to each new generation of
young people and they do so, while negotiating for pay and conditions like any
other workers. Whatever revolutionary aims they may harbour, these are still
effectively “private” from the point of view of the state education system.
The two worlds of education, bourgeois and
revolutionary, are not synthesised but remain contradictory. Can this be
altered? How?
On the school in general
This introduction, or draft opening to the
discussion, for the first session, on education, has been posted to the
dedicated school blog at http://sadtu-eight.blogspot.com/.
From that blog it is posted automatically by e-mail to a list which includes
many who will be attending the school, and others who will not. Others again
who will be attending the school are not yet on the e-mail list. As usual, like
any other educational project, we are a work in progress.
The e-mail list is set up as a “forum”, meaning that replies
will go to all of the other members of the list, subject to moderation.
Discussion can also take place in the form of “comments” to the blog.
The links in this message are to downloadable
MS-Word format documents, which should also be available in hard copy at the
school itself. Most of these documents, and many more, are available to
Print-on-Demand from a stock list at Jetline outlets. To access these
materials, please go to the blog
address given above, and follow the instructions at the top of the
right-hand column.
