Benefits of mis-education

IHAVE been following Jonathan Jansen’s recent columns on the achievements and failures of our education system with great interest.

I will not comment directly on what he has written, other than to say that by accident or design, Jansen tends to skirt around some of the more important issues that continue to make the institutions of higher learning terribly iniquitous environments.

This includes the shoring up and preservation of privileges shaped on an anvil of exploitation, expediency and abuse, and now presented as indispensable or necessary.

What I will agree with, completely, is that over the past 20 years, the bar has been lowered, increasingly, to the point where most children, from primary school to university, do as little as possible to scrape through.

The blame for this, what may be referred to as the mis-education of our children, can be shared among all of us: teachers, parents and politicians.

To the extent that this problem has an essence, it lies in our politics.

While our political objectives are not all bad, in the sense that we have a constitutional obligation to roll back the injustices of our past, there are political leaders who benefit from the mis-education of our youth.

It all starts when we treat an entire body of students, mainly black students, as “special needs” or “special education” subjects.

I draw this idea from research done by the Association of Black Psychologists (ABP) in the United States.

It may not fit perfectly, but there are some homologies between what the ABP presented as “special education and the mis-education of African American children”, and our own teaching and learning objectives in South Africa.

Experience from the US is that if you approach black students as “special needs” cases academic achievement tends to become stulted, and once they graduate, students are stigmatised and patronised as “equity” candidates, “quotas” or affirmative action placements.

In this way we close the loop of under-achievement and the reproduction of inequality.

It starts at public schools, where many teachers have been found to be dreadfully ill-prepared, academically, to teach the subjects they are meant to specialise in.

In some ways we replicate what the ABP found, in the US, where “low teacher expectations, yield low quality instruction [and] low quality instruction yields low quality education”.

One of the stand-out features of this mis-education is the way in which political parties, especially those on the radical fringes – notably the EFF, the BLF and the Zuma loyalists in the ANC – tend to benefit.

Recall that former president Jacob Zuma was especially dismissive of “clever blacks”.

The EFF members, in particular, have become masters at manipulating the emotions of young people and presenting themselves – through smart rhetoric, ethno-nationalism, racial chauvinism and populism – as the saviours of South Africa.

A recent tweet by former public protector Thuli Madonsela produced a horripilating feeling.

“If I got a dollar for every time the young people at this AU Summer School have mentioned [Julius Malema] and [the EFF] as examples of young people combating the corrupting effect of money in politics, I would be rich by now.”

The idea that the EFF, by itself, is fighting corruption is based on a very narrow reading of politics in South Africa. Let’s be honest. Every political party, other than the Zuma loyalists in the ANC, has been battling corruption for the better part of a decade. Even those dreaded liberals in the DA have been forceful in their criticism.

The EFF has been effective only because of the levels of noise its members make and the constant threats of violence.

The EFF benefits the most from the mis-education of South Africans.

Their immediate response to any criticism of the movement is a resort to violence, intimidation, name-calling and slander.

For example, over the past several weeks I have written a series of articles about the global rise of fascism, a retreat into ethno-nationalist pride, and notions of purity, and the parallels that are apparent in South Africa.

In the days after the last piece was published, in which I discussed similarities between the abuse of journalists by the old Afrikaner We er stands be wee gin gin the 1980s and the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu last month, I received nasty comments.

There was at least one death threat, and any number of ad hominem attacks and insults.

One person said my criticism of the EFF confirmed why Nelson Mandela University was correct to fire me in October last year.

For legal reasons I was unable to respond. Another decried my reference to Carter Woodson’s book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, as an insult to “the African child”.

My specific reference, drawing on Woodson’s landmark 1933 book, was that those who had not learnt anything for themselves (and relied on the EFF’s “superior logic”) had to depend solely on others, and would, therefore, “never obtain any more rights or privileges”.

The more I listen to young followers of the EFF, BLF and some factions in the ruling party, mainly those leading the support for Zuma, the more I realise just how disastrous our schooling system has been in the past 20 years.

In this, Jansen has a point.

‘ The more I listen to young followers of the EFF, BLF and some factions in the ruling party, the more I realise just how disastrous our schooling system has been in the past 20 years