‘You never get a livelihood out of going to school’: the crisis of urban modernity and the education-employment nexus in Harare, Zimbabwe

Abstract

The economic crisis and informalisation in Zimbabwe from the late 1990s had many consequences, including the unattainability of the early postcolonial modernist lifestyle and the collapse of the robust education-employment nexus and steady transition pathway from school to work for graduates in urban areas. Education in Zimbabwe played social mobility and social transformation and reproduction functions from colonial times and continued to have an inherent value to Zimbabweans in the postcolonial period. However, with the collapse of the education-employment nexus and structural changes in the opposition movement which offered a transition path from university into party politics until the late 2000s, many school and university graduates did not get to experience social mobility. Accompanied by the wider frustrating conditions, such as bad governance, corruption and economic decline, this resulted in young people reconsidering the social mobility function of education and challenging modernist premises about education. These premises had been reproduced at different levels from family to wider society, and young people started rethinking and challenging them through their narratives, considering curriculum changes to include entrepreneurship education, participation in the informal economy and protest movements, all of which challenge the postcolonial modernity framework.