The Politics and Economics of Education
On March 12 this year the government will present its budget for the next financial year. All sorts of expectation are being canvassed as this editorial is being written. They add up in the main to hopes and assurances from "experts" that the mistakes of 1996-97 will not be repeated in the 1997-98 budget and in the conduct of the many ministries entrusted with "reconstruction and development" of the country as a whole. The poor and deprived millions, whose numbers increase daily, have been fobbed off for some years now with promises of houses, jobs, good primary health care, quality education and, in general a better life for all. This has been the thrust of spokespersons within the formal governing structures of the country. At the same time the country has been swallowed up in a tidal wave of crime and corruption that has destroyed substantially any meaning that security, safety and peace might have had in the lives of the ordinary man, woman and child.
Thus when the premier of Gauteng in 1995 promised some 150000 houses for that year it was sheer political gobbledygook, for the simple reason that neither the Gauteng Province nor the Central Government had the means - particularly the capital - to build those houses. For such a project alone some R10 billion would have been required, apart from the availability of materials, labour and administrative capacity. The physical and economic reality that province that each province had to face in this area of non-development and non-delivery had its roots in the very nature of South African society as a neo-colony within the body politic of the 20th century world imperialism-colonialism.
The State and the government are not the same things. Government is part of the State. It is the deliberate confusion sown in the minds of ordinary men and women that makes people imagine that the government - as in South Africa, or Zimbabwe, or India or Namibia - can fashion the State as it wishes. The State is the whole; the governing structures are a part, a subsidiary of the State.
In plain, simple terms South Africa, as a State, is part of a global system of Imperialism-Colonialism. Its economics, politics, the health, welfare, education and general level of development of its people are determined mainly by that relationship. Even if it is difficult for people to accept that this is so, and to understand how that reality impacts on the daily lives of people, it is necessary for teachers, politicians, economists, writers and mere passive observers of the passage of events to understand this fact if they are going to make sense of the workings of society.
Moreover, if that understanding is not a critical one which refreshes itself as changes do occur, then a certain fate awaits any person who lacks such understanding. He or she becomes a mere slip of blotting paper that soaks up all the sophistry that establishment media - press, pulpit, radio, television and the myriad feel-good magazines - provide for the quasi-literate and the sadly illiterate.
The economics and politics of the State are determined and held in place by the many institutions that the dominant class of the society creates to establish and maintain the virtual monopoly of power. The Romans, the mediaeval feudalists and the modern capitalist-imperialist order have all in their time built society upon such, for them, "prioritised" foundations. This knowledge is nothing new. The scholars of the English, French, European, Russian, Chinese and other revolutions have written tomes on this very vital truth. Their work has been challenged and complemented by the radical revolutionary movements and their writers, who have in our time challenged the very foundations of capitalism-imperialism-colonialism. They have sought to lay the foundations for new societies which must put an end to the wars and human suffering that dominate present world society.
Yet it is a strange truth that in our own society one of the biggest problems arises from the gigantic framework of deception practised upon the masses to make them believe, like Voltaire’s Candide, that this is the "best of all possible worlds". And that a few improvements here and there and a few magical personalities at hand can do the necessary to achieve a better life for all.
The government can and does regulate in some ways the different constituent parts of the State. But the final ownership and control of the whole economy of the State rests in the hands of local and foreign owners of what matters in the economy. Radical social thinkers regard the government as the mere executive of that economic class, the body that carries out its orders. There is lots of evidence in this country to verify such a description.
The government in its budget has a debt-component of nearly 46% of the total. In the past year it not only had to borrow R37 billion to carry out its plan for a "better life for all". It had to use an almost equal sum to pay the interest on existing loans of some R300 billion and to repay some of the borrowed capital. In business terms that would equal certain bankruptcy and disaster. Yet even as this occurs the chief owners of the economy - banks, insurance, mines, farms, factories, for example - announce record profits. To make up its debts the government looks around for just anything it can tax - through income tax, VAT, excise duties and so on - virtually regardless of the effects upon the lives of the "man-in-the-street".
The surplus wealth that is produced in the economy as a whole is not available for the "government" to use to provide education, health services, cultural amenities, social welfare, jobs and houses - all those things which make up the demands of people in protest meetings, strikes, petitions, placard demonstrations.
"They steal the hog and give the feet for alms" has been a historical summing-up of this real difference between the State - the whole society - and the government, that part of the State which seeks to regulate those aspects of society it is permitted to regulate.
We in South Africa have the worst of both worlds. The dominant capitalist-imperialist classes do steal the hog. But their servants, who in the past and even now as this criticism is being written have had the task of giving the alms to the masses, have stolen much of the alms - the scraps, the crumbs from the plutocrats’ tables - and have handed out the rest to some and nothing to others - those millions crowding jobless, homeless and futureless into the urban, peri-urban and rural slums.
Thus, while it has been necessary for us to point out in detail why the system of education in this country is so vile and contemptuous of the concerns of all of South African’s 42 million people, the same measuring rod applies equally well to the stubborn disasters in such vital areas as housing, employment, health, justice, safety and security and in the social relationships of people eager to rid society of racism, gender discrimination, false values and attitudes and all the rest of the social trash that makes this country a thoroughly cruel and unhappy one.
Pharmacological drugs, legal and illegal, in the USA are a political weapon in the hands of the State’s CIA and FBI. That use of drugs occurs in this country too. But the frenetic concern with high-powered sports programmes, the antics of burnt-out pop stars, and freaks presented on radio and television are only too freely used in addition to saleable drugs, to fill the gaps in people’s daily lives. The alms alone cannot do that.
The Romans used bread and circuses to drug their "common people". Here bread is not freely available. Even subsidies on it have been removed to bail a bankrupt government out of trouble. But the circuses are indispensable, are growing in number and variety and out of this cultural dung-heap the government and its helpers are creating a new pantheon of sports gods and goddesses in whose achievements the bemused youth may see the substitutes of their own shattered dreams.
The pupils sitting without books and teachers, their parents without jobs and homes, the sick and needy without social care, the youth with their bright-eyed, hope-filled visages, or the elderly, their faces corrugated, the peace-seekers who are haunted by rampant theft and violence - all have suffered a common defeat.
But when the would-be providers of education falsify and vandalise the system and use the most puerile sophistry to evade the truth they rob the youth of this country in a way that no other creature in the animal kingdom is known to do to its young, and its very own future. Make no mistake, Minister Bengu, and all who serve you. You may claim that "rationalisation (of education) is still on track". You may shut your eyes and ears to what is actually happening in the schools. But you and your fellow ministers are clearly heading for further disasters, taking the teachers, the youth and what remains of education with you.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL.67 #2, OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE TEACHERS’ LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, MARCH 1997]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
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