Celebrate matrics: products of the problem
BRITISH writer and theologian CS Lewis once stated: “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil”.
As we reflect on the announcement of the matric results, the profundity of these words becomes more palpable.
Every year without fail, the announcement of matric results thrusts the South African media into a frenzy, jostling to find the most heart-wrenching stories about matriculants who obtained distinctions under the most difficult of circumstances.
For the next few days, we will be reading stories about matriculants who had to study using candlelight, in some poverty-stricken parts of the country.
We will read about matriculants who went to bed on hungry stomachs, who were part of child-headed homes after losing parents to some dreaded disease. We will read about matriculants who had to walk 10km to school, crossing dangerous bridges over streams that could have swept them away.
We will read about matriculants who have disabilities, who were able to obtain distinctions in a society that caters largely for able-bodied people.
In reading all these stories of triumph over adversity, we are going to celebrate these individual students.
But very few people are going to see through the deeply problematic narrative that wants to suggest that with enough personal effort, the material conditions that define the lives of the poor are surmountable.
The celebration of matriculants who obtain good marks under impossible circumstances is not simply an innocent appreciation of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.
When we say, “If a matriculant who went to bed hungry and woke up to walk 10km to school barefoot can get distinctions, anyone else can”; what we are in fact saying is that the problem with our society is not its structural violence, but an individual will.
We are shifting attention away from the fact that poverty is not natural, that it is the product of a system that thrives on the economic enslavement of the many by a few.
The celebration of the increase in the number of matriculants is also reflective of our inability (or refusal) to engage in honest reflection. The reality of the situation is that the matric results demonstrate a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.
Throughout their schooling, the matric class of 2019 has been taught values grounded in individuality and consumerism. They have been taught neo-liberal Economics, a distorted History, sciences devoid of humanity and Computer Applications Technology that celebrates automation and mechanisation without considering the alienation of workers.
Even those who obtained distinctions, whom we today celebrate, are products of an education system whose values are problematic, and at the heart of the inequalities and violence that produces students who must walk 10km to school on a hungry stomach.
Their education, therefore, is useful only in so far as it perpetuates a devilish system.
Wa Azania is a Masters candidate in the Department of Geography, Rhodes University, while Matshwi is the spokesperson for the Young Communist League in Gauteng