Publications
Partners
Is there a link between the recent violence (lately the student protests and last year against immigrants) in South Africa and neoliberal policy? I believe so.
Last year at least six foreigners died in several xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Their businesses were torched, families hounded from their homes. The reason: They take away jobs from South Africans. In reality however, only 4% of the working population are international migrants. But what is even more noteworthy is the low unemployment rate that exists in comparison with non-migrants.
This can be an effect of the policy that employs migrants that are more likely to take jobs that locals are not willing to do. But even so it might be the case that there aren’t sufficient South Africans trained in certain (low skilled) professions. This is likely since vocational education became stigmatised after apartheid. As a consequence, there is currently a high need for people with technical and artisan skills.
What’s more, with the introduction of the National Quality Framework (NQF), developed by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), attempts to integrate education and training provision deemed unsuccessful. The policy focused on making people employable, but rather than increasing the quantity or quality of provision, it made provision even more difficult.
This has to do with the outcomes-based NQF which stated, without prescribing a specific style of teaching or assessment, that by the end of the educational experience, students should have achieved the planned goals. Outcomes seemed to provide a way of validating the knowledge of people who had been deprived of formal education due to apartheid. Because of apartheid, stating a new curriculum was hard, not to say impossible. Curricula an sich were looked at as authoritarian and were associated with ideological control. Focussing on outcomes seemed to be the needed transformation.
South Africa followed the neoliberal trends in the world, making the industry (and not expert educationalists) judge their educational worth. Consequently learners were to be prepared for the economy and evaluated by their learning outcomes. This is a reflection of neoliberalism, which incorporates education and economy.
I argue that even though the government seemed ready for this neoliberalism, the people were not. In formal education, the outcomes-based curriculum failed because it was too complex for teachers to understand and (for the better) was never fully implemented. But in vocational training it stayed very much alive, with all the consequences it entails.
At first sight the second link between violence and policy is more obvious. Students repel the policy that orders them to pay high tuition fees. At a deeper level, to me, this likewise is a consequence of the marketisation of education that embraces the promotion of social, economic and educational inequality. ‘The war on talent’ is a product of neoliberalism as well and is in its turn linked to the employment of immigrants. The recruitment of these foreign (top) workers can make the country more competitive and attractive.
According to this perspective, xenophobism could eventually endanger the South African economy because talent should be recruited regardless of nationality, background, gender and race. Yet, for South African students with disadvantaged backgrounds it becomes impossible to become acknowledged as top talent, since education is too expensive. Given the background of separatism in South-Africa, this is a very emotive subject. It seems as if the white students, that have wealthy backgrounds from the past, are still the most advantaged ones. But in the whole world, the trend that favours equality for all people brings no better alternative. If countries want to attract top talent (from their own country or others), higher levels of income inequality has to be accepted. Neoliberalism does not aim at redistributing wealth. It aims at improving individual’s ‘employability’.
But herein lies a paradox. Neoliberalism sees it as the task of ‘the poor’ to integrate themselves into the social and economic mainstream, not by earning money, but by learning. However as becomes clear, this learning costs money that those students do not have. Nevertheless this might be defended by the statement that everyone has equal opportunity. Which of course is a big joke when you take into account that 80% of all South African schools are dysfunctional, the many families with only one parent to provide, the large classes, language issues, slums ...
I hope that by now the link between the stated violence in South Africa and neoliberalism has become clear. The apartheid slogan ‘People’s Education for People’s Power’ can in this sense still be used. Once again; what might a different, alternative education system for the majority of the people, be like?
