Centre for Education Policy Development THE QUEST FOR FREE EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA How close is the dream to the reality?
R. Cassius Lubisi, PhD Solomon Mahlangu Education Lecture 2008
Constitution Hill, 17 June 2008 1
Centre for Education Policy Development
THE QUEST FOR FREE EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA How close is the dream to the reality?
R. Cassius Lubisi, PhD 1
Solomon Mahlangu Education Lecture 2008
Constitution Hill, Johannesburg 17 June 2008
1 Dr Lubisi is the Superintendent General of Education in KwaZulu-Natal. 2
Published by the Centre for Education Policy Development PO Box 31892 Braamfontein 2017 Johannesburg South Africa
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CEPD Website: http://www.cepd.org.za
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ISBN: 978-0-9814095-4-2
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Foreword
Solomon Kalushi Mahlangu was a young liberation movement activist who left South Africa in the wake of the June 1976 Soweto Uprising. On re-entering South Africa as a militant of Umkhonto we Sizwe, he and a colleague, Mondy Motloung, were captured after a skirmish with the police and several white civilians who were assisting them. Two of the civilians were killed. Although the judge found that Solomon had personally played no direct part in killing them (either by shooting or throwing a hand grenade), he was found guilty of murder through ‘common purpose’ and sentenced to death. Mondy Motloung was so badly assaulted during interrogation that he sustained brain damage and was unable to stand trial. Despite an international outcry – involving the UN Security Council and several governments and heads of state – Solomon Mahlangu was executed on 6 April 1979, the anniversary of Van Riebeeck’s establishment of the first colonial settlement in South Africa. In the same year, the ANC established the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania to provide for the education of young South African exiles. Solomon Mahlangu’s last words were reproduced on a wall at the entrance to the school: “My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight.”
The Centre for Education Policy Development has established the Solomon Mahlangu Education Lecture to honour the spirit and memory of Solomon Mahlangu. The annual lecture highlights education as a major area of transformation and a crucial sphere of national development in South Africa.
The Mahlangu family has consented to the use of Solomon Mahlangu’s name for the lecture. 4
The Quest for Free Education in South Africa How close is the dream to the reality?
Chairperson of the Board of the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD) and General Secretary of the SACP, Dr Blade Nzimande;
Director of the Centre for Education Policy Development, Mr John Pampallis;
Members of the family of the late Cde Solomon ‘Kalushi’ Mahlangu;
Distinguished guests;
Ladies and gentlemen:
It gives me great pleasure to address you on the occasion of the third Solomon Mahlangu Education Lecture. I wish to express my gratitude to the CEPD for inviting me to address you on this important event.
This year marks the twenty-ninth anniversary of the cruel curtailment of the young life of Cde Solomon ‘Kalushi’ Mahlangu on 6 April 1979. Despite the intention of the Apartheid Regime to obliterate the memory of Cde Solomon Mahlangu, the opposite was achieved. The seed for the total undermining of the machinations of the Apartheid Regime was laid by none other than Solomon Mahlangu himself when, on his way to the gallows, he heroically declared:
My blood will nourish the tree that will bear the fruits of freedom. Tell my people that I love them. They must continue the fight.
It is now history that Mahlangu’s blood more than amply nourished the tree that bore the fruits of the freedom we all enjoy today.
While enjoying the freedom that Solomon Mahlangu laid down his life for, we have every obligation to honour the ideals for which he died.
It is significant that this memorial lecture is held a day after the 32nd anniversary of the June 16 Uprising. Like Solomon Mahlangu, hundreds of 5 young people lost their lives in the cause of freedom in general, and in the struggle for a just education system in particular. It is in memory of these gallant heroes and heroines that we should continuously strive to reach the educational goals for which we struggled.
This year’s Solomon Mahlangu Education Lecture places its focus on the ideal of free education, an ideal which has been on the agenda of the National Democratic Revolution and international struggles for social justice for many years.
The Legacy of Apartheid Education
In the South African context, we cannot speak about free education outside the legacy of apartheid education.
In recent times we have heard a body of opinion that seeks to downplay or even discount the impact of the legacy of apartheid on education in our country. This body of opinion, based on a rather severe case of lazy thinking and analysis, seeks to convince the rest of us that the malaise we see in education in the current era all results from the limitations of post-apartheid education policies.
While we do not seek a post-apartheid triumphalist explanation of all that goes wrong in education, no analyst worth his salt can gainsay the devastating effects of apartheid on the education of our people in general, and the poor in particular, even in the post-apartheid era.
Lest we forget, apartheid education sought to deliberately provide inferior education to the majority of our people. The master plan of unequal education provision as plotted by the Eiselen Commission of 1948 found its statutory expression in the Bantu Education Act of 1953. It is through this open expression of statutory racism that at one stage the ratio of White:Black education expenditure stood at 14:1. It is solely because of apartheid education that we today experience huge infrastructure backlogs and concomitant unequal class sizes, and unequal education quality, among schools that find themselves in opposite loci of the apartheid-inherited spatial geography. 6
The Eiselen Commission explicitly recommended that less should be spent on teacher education for Africans than for White people. It is on this basis that a plethora of teacher training colleges that were no more than glorified high schools were created to cater for Africans. It is of great import that as we grapple with the limitations of our current teacher education initiatives, we do not construct idealised conceptions of the past of teacher education for the majority of Africans in our country.
It is amply documented that colonialism and apartheid uprooted black people from the land, their major means of production. Apartheid colonialism also ensured that black people did not have access to other means of production, thus rendering them workers and peasants in the colonial and apartheid social division of labour.
In this social position, the majority of our people found themselves being consumers rather than producers of goods and services.
Free and Compulsory Education: An Historical Ideal
There have been heated debates from time immemorial on the nature of education as a public good. Central to these debates has been the argument that public education should be freely available to the student, that is, it should be funded through public taxes and the student or parent is not supposed to pay end-user fees to be educated in public institutions.
The notion of education as a private good has its roots in libertarianism, an ideology that (over)emphasises individual freedom, and seeks to reduce the state and its role to a minimum. Concomitantly, education is seen as a commodity that should be sold and bought in the marketplace. End-user fees are seen in this context as the price that should be paid by the consumer for education in its commodified form.
With the historical position of Africans in the social division of labour, and the abject levels of poverty that many face, it goes without saying that where education is a commodity to be bought in the marketplace, its affordability becomes an issue for many of our people. 7
It is for this reason that the quest for free education has been an integral part of the struggle for social justice internationally and in our country.
In its 1942 national conference, the African National Congress (ANC) put together a team of leaders to develop a written response to the Atlantic Charter as adopted by Roosevelt and Churchill. Out of this process emerged the Africans’ Claims document that was adopted by the national conference of the ANC on 16 December 1943. In regard to education, the Africans’ Claims had the following to say:
The education of the African is a matter of national importance requiring state effort for its proper realisation. The magnitude of the task places it beyond the limits of the resources of the missionary or private endeavour. The right of the African child to education, like children of other sections, must be recognised as a State duty and responsibility (my emphasis).
We, therefore, demand that:
a. The state must provide full facilities for all types of education for African children. b. Education of the African must be financed from General Revenue on a per capita basis. c. The state must provide enough properly built and equipped schools for all African children of school going age and institute free compulsory primary education (my emphasis). d. The state must provide adequate facilities for secondary, professional, technical and university education.
The Africans’ Claims was a trailblazing document. It even preceded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights highlighted educational rights similar to those contained in the Africans’ Claims. In this regard the UN General Assembly declared:
Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory (my emphasis). Technical and professional education shall be 8
made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
At the Congress of the People held in Kliptown, our people adopted the Freedom Charter on 26 June 1955. The Freedom Charter declared that “the doors of learning and culture shall be opened”. Elaborating on this clause, the charter declared that:
Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children (my emphasis); higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit.
From the Africans’ Claims, through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the Freedom Charter, one theme is clear: free, universal, compulsory education for all children up to at least the end of primary schooling seems to be the bottom line.
The Macro-economic Context of the Post-apartheid Project
The Africans’ Claims, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Freedom Charter are products of a particular era in the struggle for social justice. Sociologically, these could be classified as documents located firmly in modernity, with their underlying emphasis on human progress.
South Africa happened to attain its liberation from apartheid colonialism ‘at the wrong time’, if there ever was one. At the time we attained our liberation, the condition that obtained, inter alia , had the following characteristics that were not necessarily present during the era of the adoption of the Freedom Charter:
• the dominance of the libertarian project, having reinvented itself as neo- liberalism; • the emergence of what former US President George H.W. Bush termed the ‘New World Order’, with the balance of world forces decisively skewed in favour of a conservative establishment in the United States of America (consisting of the Christian right, and the petroleum and arms industries); • post-modernity, with its incredulity towards meta-narratives, including 9
meta-narratives of human progress that characterised modernity; and • the proliferation of information and communications technologies, which allowed for accelerated globalisation and the enhanced dominance of transnational corporations and their underlying macro-economic ideology.
In an attempt to respond to this changed condition, our government adopted the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR). It is now common cause that GEAR ushered in a period of fiscal belt-tightening that saw declines in social expenditure, including education. 2 We adopted a conservative approach to the balance of payments, emphasising minimum indebtedness to international institutions and foreign governments, partly in response to the dominant socio-economic condition and partly as an attempt to avoid being a client state beholden to the dictates of international capital.
In the GEAR context, therefore, it was seen as inconceivable that our new democracy could venture into the rhetoric, let alone the reality, of free education. Free education was simply seen as not being kosher.
Post-apartheid Interventions towards Free Education
If the truth be told, even the Constitution as adopted in May 1996 (and first amended in October 1996), ducked free education. Section 29(1) of the Constitution states:
Everyone has the right - (a) to basic education, including adult basic education; and (b) to further education, which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible.
The South African Schools Act (1996) also ducks free education and limits itself to compulsory school attendance, as can be seen in section 3(1) below:
Subject to this Act and any applicable provincial law, every parent must cause every learner for whom he or she is responsible to attend a school from the first
2 Education expenditure has fallen from about 6% to the current 5.4% of GDP. 10
school day of the year in which such learner reaches the age of seven years until the last school day of the year in which such learner reaches the age of fifteen years or the ninth grade, whichever occurs first.
The injunction for compulsory education begs the question of whether the state can compel parents to cause their children of a particular age to attend school, where such parents cannot afford to pay for the education of their children due to their location on the socio-economic ladder.
To its credit, the state has actually answered this question. The state did this through the introduction of school fee exemptions on a sliding scale, depending on levels of income. This is established through regulations determined by the Minister of Education. Even attempts by a group of 17 ex- Model C schools to challenge the regulations in the Pietermaritzburg High Court early in 2007 failed, thus establishing fee exemption as a key mechanism for coupling compulsory education with affordability. 3
This still begs another question though – that is, who pays the exempted portion of the school fees for parents who qualify for the exemption? The answer is less comfortable for the state here.
For the more affluent schools, the exempted portion is paid for by more affluent parents through undeclared and rather surreptitious cross- subsidisation. In this case, the cross-subsidisation is achieved by way of higher school fees. And higher school fees then lead to more parents not being able to afford, hence more fee exemptions … and so the vicious circle goes. If left unchecked, this could seriously undermine public education, as the more affluent parents could begin to see little difference between public and private education, which could see the flight of the rand to private schools.
In the case of the less affluent schools, the exempted portion of school fees is not paid by anyone. In simple terms, it is totally lost to the school. The implications for the proper functioning of the school and for quality education provision are obvious.
3 Of course the fee exemptions apply throughout the schooling system, and not only for the compulsory phase. 11
By far the closest we have come to free education, at least for the poor, was the introduction of no-fee schools. The introduction of the concept of no-fee schools emerged in response to the injunction of the 51st ANC Conference in Stellenbosch in December 2002. Thereafter, the Department of Education produced a document titled Report on the Resourcing, Funding and Costs of Education in March 2003. This led to the adoption by the Cabinet of the Plan of Action Towards Free Basic Education in June 2003.
Without doubt, the no-fee policy has brought fee relief to millions of poor parents throughout the country, and has more importantly protected children from being victimised for their parents’ inability to pay school fees.
The question can be asked as to the extent to which the no-fee-schools policy represents our best effort towards free education. It can be strongly argued that we are traversing a path towards free education, and the no-fee-schools policy takes us a step closer to the ideal.
However, it can also be argued that the policy does have limitations which should be addressed as we move forward. One such limitation is the use, in the absence of other equally easy methods, of the quintile system to target poor learners. The system is based on the assumption that schools are patronised by learners from the local communities in which the school is located, which is not the case in many instances. Secondly, the use of the school as a unit of analysis often hides the plight of individual learners. Thirdly, and related to the second limitation, the use of average income could lead to incorrect targeting at the lower and upper ends of the income range. Fourthly, there is doubt about the adequacy of the levels of funding provided to no-fee schools.
The Polokwane Resolutions on Free Education
The 52nd Conference of the ANC held in Polokwane in December 2007 saw a major push to make education a national priority and to revive the issue of free education. Inter alia , the following resolutions were adopted:
Resolution 43: The no-fee schools should be expanded to 60% by 2009. 12
Resolution 44: Progressively introduce free education for the poor until undergraduate level (my emphasis).
Resolution 45: The ANC to focus rigorously on the quality of education.
Resolution 46: Education must be prioritised as one of the most important programmes in the next five years.
What these resolutions jointly point to is the urge to prioritise free education of high quality.
Resolution 44 shows both continuity and discontinuity with previous ideals as cited earlier in this lecture. Continuity is evident in the call for free education, as was the case in the Africans’ Claims, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Freedom Charter.
The discontinuity arises, firstly, from the Polokwane resolution’s limitation of free education to “the poor”, as opposed to the universality ideal of the earlier documents. Secondly, Polokwane goes beyond schooling, and ventures into free education in higher education.
The Polokwane pro-poor bias can be understood from the ideological slant of the majority of delegates at the conference and the current left-leaning wave in the ANC. The approach, though, makes it inseparable from the no-fee-schools policy, at least in so far as schooling goes (which explains why the free education resolution was formulated simultaneously with the resolution to expand the no-fee policy to reach 60% of learners). 4 In specifying “the poor” as the target of free education, the resolution would require choices to be made on how “the poor” should be defined, and hence who would benefit from the policy. Recently, Statistics South Africa defined the poverty datum line for South Africa using the absolute poverty approach. Are those of our people who fall below the poverty line to be the sole beneficiaries of the policy, or are there alternative measures of poverty in the context of free education?
4 Resolution 43 is inadequately formulated. It should be referring to 60% of learners. The current formulation gives the wrong impression that the 60% refers to schools. 13
Some Case Studies on Free Education
Several countries have provided free education for their citizens. Scandinavian countries are perhaps the most well known for this. The United States of America (USA), Cuba and Sri Lanka are but some of the countries that have provided free education at least at the level of schooling.
A pertinent question is how free education has been funded in these countries.
USA
The Constitution of the USA makes no mention of education. As a result, education is constitutionally not a federal function, although in recent years the federal government has been defining a greater role for itself in education. Education is largely a state and local matter.
The funding of education is drawn largely from the state (average about 48%) and local taxes (average about 45%). The federal government provides about 7% of the funding of schools.
Property taxes have remained the most dominant source of funding in many states. This has led to inequalities in funding as states and local districts have different tax bases. In general, school districts with higher property values receive much of their funding from property taxes, while districts with lower property values receive much of their funding from state resources.
Funding education through property taxes has, however, become unstuck in 27 of the 50 states that make up the USA in that state Supreme Courts have previously found this practice to be unconstitutional. The courts found that the use of property taxes permitted wealthier communities to have better funded schools at lower tax rates than poorer communities. The courts directed state legislatures to define adequacy levels of funding, and to draw such funding from sources that would not lead to differential funding from place to place.
Cuba
In Cuba, education is free at all levels, including university. 14
All funding for free education in Cuba comes from state coffers. What enables Cuba to fund education is the relatively high level of education expenditure as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2003, expenditure stood at 9.3% of the GDP and 30% of national expenditure. This is in keeping with high levels of expenditure in social services in socialist countries, where a different macro and micro-economic model is followed.
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is also one of the developing countries where education is free at all levels, including university level (although university education is limited to very few graduates of the schooling system – about 12%). Free education was introduced in 1945.
Funding for the majority of schools is derived from provincial sources, with about 320 ‘national schools’ being funded centrally by the (national) Ministry of Education. The national schools tend to be better resourced than the rest of the almost 10 000 schools.
Literacy campaigns
Even in countries where education is not free, one often finds that adults learning to read and write in mass literacy campaigns, including in our country, are provided such education free of charge.
Such campaigns are often funded from special allocations in the fiscus.
What Will It Take to make Polokwane a Reality?
What some of the examples briefly cited above show is that the funding of free education can be vexing and complex, especially where certain forms of taxation are used to source funding, as is the case in the United States.
It is also obvious from what we have said earlier that we need to do more than we are currently doing to realise the goal of free education, especially for the poor of our country. 15
It is inescapable to either levy special taxes or to redirect expenditure from other areas of spending. Could we consider levying a special education reconstruction tax or a graduate tax in the same manner that we levied a transitional tax in the early years of our democracy?
But we also need to think outside the box. In this regard, we could redirect some of our current education expenditure to the cause of free education through, for example, reducing the costs of the construction of education infrastructure through a more effective National Youth Service, which will require every young person at a particular level of education to participate in a mass school building programme along the lines of the Peace Corps inspired by the late President John F. Kennedy in the USA. In simple terms, taxation does not have to be solely monetary – it can be in kind.
A Practical Step towards the Realisation of Free Education
There can be no gainsaying the fact that many in the education system have been thinking endlessly about ways in which we can further enhance our march towards free education. As indicated earlier, we have made great strides in this regard.
Experience has taught us that in recent years major changes in education have been brought about by firm recommendations and plans emerging from a deliberately organised process led by a brains trust.
In this regard, it is strongly recommended that a special commission or committee be appointed to investigate and make recommendations on a plan of action for fully realising free education in our country. Such a committee could include economists, educationists, social scientists, unionists, and any other relevant experts. The committee would also need to engage in wide consultations on its draft proposals before such proposals could be finally presented to the Cabinet for approval within two years.
In the words of Fidel Castro:
Today we are seeking what should be and will be, in our judgment, an 16
education system that increasingly corresponds to the equality, full justice, self-esteem and moral and social needs of all people in the type of society that [we] have decided to build.
And the society we have decided to build is one that draws its inspiration from the ideals for which Solomon Mahlangu paid the supreme sacrifice. Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD) PO Box 31892 Braamfontein 2017 Johannesburg South Africa
Office Tel: +27 11 403-6131 Fax: +27 11 403-1130 Website: http://www.cepd.org.za