CONTEXT AND CONTEST IN SOUTH AFRICAN EDUCATION POLICY: COMMENT ON CURTIN

Abstract

IN RECENT YEARS, there has emerged a burgeoning literature on education policy in South Africa informed by the nature of the current transition and history of educational struggles under apartheid. The article by Curtin on the political economy of education in South Africa recently published in this journal, misrepresents in substantial measure current policy directions in education.1 The starting premise of Curtin's article is that the African National Congress (ANC) 'alternative budget' presented in 1992 is synonymous with ANC education policy. This policy, it is argued, is characterized by an emphasis on primary education at the expense of post-primary, and the introduction of a system of user charges. It is underpinned by the same economic model, human capital theory, on which Verwoerd's policy was based. The emphasis on primary education in contemporary South Africa is flawed, it is argued, first because 'South Africa has already achieved universal primary and lower secondary education for blacks' (p. 417); second because it suggests restriction and exclusion of blacks from higher education; third because of 'the basic errors in the education policy model applied by the ANC and its advisors' (p. 424) (which derive from an uncritical model of rates of return analysis and the association, in more recent developments of the model, with intelligence theories); and fourth, because there is a divergence of these assumptions from those of standard investment analysis. The argument alights on key issues of debate and contestation in South African education policy: the role of ideas and ideology in shaping its contours, the content of education policy in transition, and the continuities and discontinuities with past policy and practice. The attention given to human capital theory is particularly apposite, since it reflects a phenomenon widely observed in the developing world: the resuscitation of neoliberalism under the auspices of financial institutions such as the World Bank associate.2 In South Africa as elsewhere however this requires demonstration, exploration and explanation rather than assertion and reference to one public intervention in the press.