Brett Peterson and Dr. John Hawkins, Anthropology

In South Africa, despite positive changes in school structure and potential educational attainment, revolutionary changes to South African society interact with the current state of South African education to produce a negative educational effect.

The following information is based upon a three month field-study experience in South Africa. The field study focused on education and involved interviews with teachers, students, administrators, government officials, and parents; the information expressed is a reflection primarily of the views of Coloured South Africans, though the conclusions are also consistent with feelings expressed by individuals of Afrikaaner, Xhosa, and Indian descent.

After the African National Congress gained power in South Africa in 1994, the new regime immediately initiated an overhaul of South African institutions. Education, especially, was hailed as the best means to draw the millions of unemployed, unskilled laborers in the Black and Coloured South African communities into a better life. Lacking resources to change the abysmal funding and pedagogical situation in most South African schools, the ANC decided to focus on integrating schools formerly segregated by race.

The ANC efforts were very successful; formerly white-only private schools were opened to students of any ethnicity who could afford the school fees. Poor students were still effectively shut out of elite schools, but ANC party leaders, wealthy black farmers, and the small but important black middle class gained access to high quality educational facilities. Top universities became legally required to accept a certain proportion of non-white students, and upward social mobility became possible for the non-white middle class.

Unfortunately, these positive changes for the non-white elite did not improve the lot of the millions of poor black students who continued to attend underfunded schools. Indeed, after apartheid, funding for some schools apparently decreased as state funding for non-white students shifted to formerly private schools. The purpose of education, as a type of domestic development program, is to empower students to assist themselves (Rowlands and Eade 227); the sum ability of students to better their lives should therefore increase with each educational revolution. As such, school integration had an indeterminate effect on South African educational quality; the increase in educational opportunity for the privileged few was offset by the decrease in education funding for the majority.

Had the ANC only integrated schools, South African education would not have improved in the South African revolution, but neither would it have been worse. However, in the process of effecting social and educational change, the ANC restricted the availability of vital extra-curricular leadership training. The current African National Congress education system could probably not produce the political leadership necessary to overthrow another apartheid regime. As such, ANC education has decreased the ability of poor black students to improve the social and material circumstances.

With the integration of schools, the culture of black South African leadership shifted to include an emphasis on education. Previously, in the apartheid era, non-white community leadership was based primarily on personal enthusiasm and skill; though non-white groups included a spectrum of socioeconomic classes, social leadership was not relegated to particular socioeconomic classes based on school attendance. As a result, poor students were able to gain training in the movement resisting apartheid, and thereby develop the financial, personal, and social skills necessary to effect social change.

After apartheid, social leadership shifted to emphasize school background. As discussed previously, school integration did not benefit the vast majority of South African students; the emphasis on elite school preparation as a prerequisite for non-white social leadership effectively cut off poor blacks and coloureds from their best opportunities to develop the skills necessary to improve their lives. Had the South African education system improved commensurately, school integration would have been a laudable achievement. Even precluding an improvement in the South African system, if South African education were of sufficient quality to promote social mobility for large portions of its population, removing the violence and abuses of apartheid education may also have resulted in a net increase in student empowerment. In the South African context, changes in education have served to more thoroughly cement the poorest non-whites in their disadvantaged and dependent social position.

Apartheid education was repressive; however, the violence and abuses of the apartheid system spawned a widespread resistance movement. The resistance movement provided critical, egalitarian extra-curricular instruction in leadership, social organization, and collective action; in terms of empowerment, this extra-curricular instruction appears to have been the single most important element of both apartheid and post-apartheid systems of education. Using the skills gained in resistance, a corps of leaders and revolutionaries were able to effectively improve their life-situations and overthrow an abusive apartheid regime.

With ANC changes in education, access to extra-curricular “resistance-style” training has been effectively limited to the children and friends of those already in power. Poor students, unaffected by school integration and still suffering from teacher-focused, under-funded schools, have witnessed their education regress. Students today struggle to improve their material and social standing or to effect social change. In a recent ANC push to eliminate freedom of the press, for example, students did not rise up in general protest or organize themselves as they learned to do in the apartheid era. Though the nominal prospects of non-white students have increased through racial integration of schools, the actual prospects of the vast, poor majority of South Africans have decreased with the end of apartheid.