No winners in political game
IWATCHED the television series, The Wire, over the holidays. Set in the city of Baltimore, on the Atlantic seaboard of the US, the series comprises five thematic seasons: drug trafficking and abuse, the city seaport, the city government and its bureaucracy, the schooling system and the print media.
The Wire shows how all these areas are interconnected, how a port city, its politics and government, the media and the communities are all part of the same system, and how problems in one sector can lead to problems elsewhere.
I last watched the series almost 10 years ago, when I used it in my political economy, development and politics classes.
It proved to be an indispensable springboard to discuss matters of race, politics, sociology, cultural criticism, masculinity, drug abuse and the schooling system in Baltimore’s poor areas – where wealthy taxpayers abandoned the city for the more sanitised counties (suburbs outside the city limits) beyond the sightline of social catastrophe and collapse.
The Wire is used, today, by universities up and down the Atlantic Seaboard – Columbia, New York, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Rutgers Universities – where I spent a few years teaching.
Rutgers University also used the show’s portrayal of racial inequality and injustice to analyse the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
The Wire is, quite possibly, the best television series ever made.
The series reflects the day-to-day realities of turn-of-the-century Baltimore against the backdrop of economic decline, the loss of up to 65% of industrial jobs since the 1950s, the plight of poor inner-city black families who were too poor to flee to the suburbs and struggle to make ends meet in a city that is flooded with drugs and with broken social institutions.
It is the fourth season, on the schooling system, which made me pause again and again over the past few weeks.
One particular issue that has been tugging at my coat sleeve is the practice of social promotion.
This refers to the practice of passing pupils to higher grades whether or not they can read or write, or whether they have an even elementary grasp of the coursework.
Social promotion was implemented in the US as an alternative to grade retention (repeating a year if the pupil fails), which affected black pupils disproportionately.
In some ways it is no different from allowing everyone into university, whether or not they are prepared for higher learning, and passing them through the system – even if it means they cannot read or write.
In one exchange in The Wire a teenage drug dealer tells another that if it were not for social promotion he would still be in kindergarten – a slight on his friend’s intellect.
In another incident, a homeless pupil, Sherrod, appearing further into the season, left school in the fifth grade, and when he tries to enrol again, he is put in the eighth grade, never mind the fact that he had lost three years.
Sherrod soon leaves school again and never returns.
The problems in the Baltimore schooling system are part of the political economic decline of the city. Today, an estimated 82% of pupils in Baltimore are black, while the city has a black population of only 60%.
As far back as 1985-86, the schooling system was considered to be so bad that a consulting firm recommended that it be blown up (literally) and rebuilt from scratch.
It was in this context of terminal political economic decline that corruption, police brutality and social breakdown occurred.
In the schooling system, teachers, desperate to keep state funding, rarely pushed pupils to the limits of their intellectual potential.
Teachers were encouraged to teach to the test – ignoring teaching and learning, and making sure that pupils were ready, only, to take specific tests at the end of the year – and social promotion was practiced to make up the numbers.
The matter of social promotion, whether one agrees with it or not, raises the spectre of admitting tens of thousands of people to universities up and down the country in the coming weeks – and moving others through undergraduate years to make up the numbers.
This places an enormous burden on the students, the teachers, administrators and the physical institution.
It can swell class sizes, which does not help teaching and learning, and may pose health and safety risks.
In South Africa, we are faced, now, with a potentially explosive situation.
President Jacob Zuma has promised free education.
Opposition EFF leader Julius Malema has said the thousands of people who could never afford to pay for education should simply show up at the gates of higher learning, while educational institutions are, already, stretched for resources.
And so, education has become a high-stakes game in South African politics – as the future of the country is being tossed around like a football.
There’s a pithy remark by Roland Pryzbylewski, the police officer who becomes a teacher (most characters are based on real-life people) in The Wire.
“No one wins. One side just loses more slowly,” he tells his wife, while watching a sporting event.
We can only guess at who will be the ultimate losers in the high-stakes politics of South African higher learning.