The constitutional right to a basic and adult education in South Africa is one of the hallmarks of the country’s nascent democracy. Given the pre-1994 struggle for freedom, the right to education has come to be widely embraced as one of the cornerstones on which the newly-founded democratic society would be built. After all, students in South Africa’s black schools, broadly united under the slogan of Education for Liberation, ushered in what many historians would refer to as the last phase of the liberation struggle in the country. The 1970’s and 80’s saw the student movement joining other protest formations to render the country “ungovernable” – and push key actors within the apartheid state to the negotiating table. Many students sacrificed their freedoms, their educational futures, and their lives in contributing to the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Given this history, the right to basic education, and, as many would argue, a quality basic education, is a befitting acknowledgement of the role played by the pre-1994 student movement in South Africa.
However, after 28 years into democracy, this basic human right remains an elusive goal for too many children and young people in the country, especially those in the public education system. This system comprises schools that serve South Africa’s urban township and rural communities, which, in terms of numbers, contain the majority of students in the country.
While the legislative mandates and structural arrangements for change in the education system have been enacted to realize this education right, the schooling experiences of millions of children and young people attest to a different reality. Statistics from the National Department of Education in 2018 reveal that out of the 23, 471 public schools in the country, 19% had illegal pit latrines (another 37 schools had no sanitation facilities at all); 86% of the total number of schools had no laboratory; 77% had no library; 72% had no internet access; 42% had no sports facilities; and 239 schools had no electricity at all. Currently, many schools have overcrowded classrooms, a shortage of learning materials and resources, and overworked and underqualified teachers – the list goes on.
Many students experience the deleterious effects of the above conditions, which can be seen in low literacy and numeracy levels, weak orientations to learning, and high rates of student drop-out (or “push-out”) across the country. A report by Amnesty International states that for every 100 students who start school in Grade 1, between 50 – 60 of them will make it to matric (Grade 12); 40 – 50 of them will pass matric; and only 14 will go on to university.
Poor academic performance is further compounded by persistently high levels of social inequality in South Africa. Almost thirty years after the struggle to realize “a better life for all” (one of the political slogans of the African National Congress (ANC) at the time), South Africa currently remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. As some theorists would argue, the country’s education system contributes to maintaining and reproducing the social inequalities in society. This is indeed an anathema to the Education for Liberation struggle in the country.
While some progress has been made in terms of access to schooling, a national nutrition programme, and small improvements in educational outcomes (albeit from a very low base), these achievements pale in comparison to the many students who do not make it through the schooling system each year – they have been pushed out by a system that has failed them. A Department of Higher Education report showed that in 2020, approximately 17 million people aged between 15 and 60 in South Africa were in the NEET (not in employment, education or training) category. This figure comprises 44% of the 15 – 60 years old population, with more than half of the group being younger than 35 years. The personal, social, and political implications of this burgeoning group of South Africans, who have yet to enjoy the socio-economic benefits of political liberation and democracy, do not bode well for the country’s future.
The South African Constitution is often trumpeted as one of the most significant achievements of the country’s transition to democracy, and is widely regarded as among the most progressive in the world. It serves as the legal foundation of the democratic state that sets out the rights and duties of its citizens, and the structures and responsibilities of government as the key custodian and enabler of these rights. However, with widening social inequality in the country, the espoused aspirations of the Constitution seem to be receding further from the grasp of the majority of people in the country. We should all be concerned that it will be diminished to serve as mere political symbolism.
Symbols can serve as powerful motivators for action, especially in realizing a vision. They can unlock the agency of people in addressing challenges or pursuing specific goals. However, the power of symbols can also be eviscerated to become hollow rhetoric, especially when the actions required to achieve particular goals are not underpinned by political will, or there is a lack of capacity and resources required to achieve the goals. In situations like these, symbols tend to serve as a distraction from confronting and addressing the real challenges to transformation in South African society – it subverts reality, reducing it to an illusion, and creates a “pretence of progress” towards achieving goals. We see too many examples of this in the country’s political sphere.
South Africa has the potential to fulfil the human right to a quality basic education. Over the last decade, public intellectuals from the academic community have identified the key areas of change that need to be focused on. These include improving early grade reading outcomes in the urban township and rural schools; strengthening teaching practice and content knowledge; developing pro-poor funding policies to eradicate infrastructure backlogs and provide adequate learning materials to schools; and providing high quality early childhood development opportunities.
The country also maintains a vibrant civil society and education non-profit sector that have the capabilities to make a significant contribution to improving the quality of public education. Many of these organizations are at the forefront of advocacy work to address the challenges that retard the country’s progress in terms of achieving its development goals.
But South Africa requires more than the above – it needs leaders who can rekindle and pursue the noble vision of freedom, justice, and equality. This takes us back to a document that precedes the Constitution, called the Freedom Charter. The Charter articulated the aspirations of South Africa’s black majority for freedom; it formed the glue that united a broad front in the struggle against apartheid; and it provided a blueprint for action to achieve the goals of liberation.
Unfortunately, the tenets of the Freedom Charter were abandoned in favor of the political compromises that were made as part of the country’s negotiated settlement. This settlement has left the historical social and structural arrangements that underpin poverty and social inequality in the country largely intact. South Africa is free, yet not free, its freedom remains incomplete.
Amartya Sen notes that poverty is an “unfreedom,” as it denies people the opportunities to improve their lives. In South Africa’s education system, it can also be argued that educational inequality, which is directly related to poverty, is also an “unfreedom,” as it shackles the potential of young people to realize the futures they deserve.
South Africa needs leaders who will connect the country to the aspirations and unfinished work of the Freedom Charter. In the public school system, the words of Paulo Freire still ring true – education is “the practice of freedom,” and its purpose should be to enable people, especially the “oppressed,” to embrace their full humanity.
Richard Shaull, drawing on the work of Freire, further builds on this understanding of the role of education in society and states that:
“There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
In the South African context, the latter part of this statement gives life to the slogan Education for Liberation. It is the aspiration that the country’s education system should go back to. This is the essential work of leadership, and leadership is defined as the intentional practice of change and improvement in the education system.
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