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EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 OCCASIONAL PAPER EDUCATION AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER A Critical Appraisal What the Freedom Charter says The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened! The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life; All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands; The aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace; Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit; Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan; Teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens; The colour bar in cultural life, in sport and in education shall be abolished. 1 EDUCATION AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 1 This paper first appeared as chapter 7 in the publication ‘60 YEARS OF THE FREEDOM CHARTER No cause to celebrate for the working class’ Published by Workers’ World Media Productions Tel: +27 (21) 4472727 Email: Lynn@wwmp. org.za Acknowledgements Research and Writing: Dale Mc Kinley (and previous publication, 50 Years of the Freedom Charter – A Cause to Celebrate? – Michael Blake). Project co-ordination, Editing and Proofreading: Martin Jansen Design and Layout: Nicolas Dieltiens Pictures and Graphics: Mayibuye Centre, Ilrig, Eric Miller, Oryx Media Cartoons contributed by Jonathan Shapiro (“Zapiro”) EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 July 2015 Adapted by: Salim Vally (CERT) Design and layout: Mudney Halim (CERT) Cover design and EPC logo: Nomalizo Ngwenya Telephone: +27 11 482 3060 Email: [email protected] EDUCATION AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER Website: www.educatiopolicyconsortium.org.za EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 2 Apartheid and education The overall impact was severe. Apartheid education created a massive gap between the “quality of provision At the time that the Freedom Charter and the outcomes of schooling”. To give was adopted in the 1950s, almost all one example of the result, in 1978 70% skilled jobs were reserved for White of the white cohort matriculated as workers. The needs of the capitalist opposed to 5% for the black cohort. system for a more skilled black There were extremely high drop-out workforce was still quite limited and rates in black schools due to large class school education for black people was sizes, poor teacher training, lack of not a high priority. basic resources and then later in the 1980s, violent social and political The Bantu Education Act of 1953 conflict (Prew, 2014). broadly determined education policy for ‘Africans’ for the next two decades. Apartheid education was fundamental According to official policy, “Native to the warped socialisation of the black education should be based on the majority to be subservient wage slaves principles of trusteeship, non-equality as well as underpinning their and segregation” (quoted in Badat, oppression. It prevented any 1999). The mission schools were taken meaningful social and economic over by the Apartheid education advancement and constructed (white administration and there was huge supremacist) authority as the differentiation in the levels of spending repository of knowledge and power. on schooling on the basis of racial Further, it associated tools of social classification. engineering such as a race-based moulding and suppression of sporting ‘Separate development’ for education and cultural expression that only in the ‘homelands’ became increasingly served to entrench social inequality. important. Ultimately, apartheid segregation and the homelands policy ensured that under the racist regime there were 19 different educational departments. Education policy encouraged a sense of inferiority, subordination and respect for authority in black students. This approach was reflected in the budget allocation for education that guaranteed high quality education for Whites and inferior education for black people, especially ‘Africans’. There were vast disparities in terms of the number and quality of schools built, student-teacher ratios and education facilities and amenities. EDUCATION AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 3 the Second World War. A more liberatory and universalist What the education and understanding of the aim of education, culture clause meant at the involving the idea of the fullest development of the individual and the time importance of developing critical thinking as part of a democratic Other than the clause referring to collective, is wholly absent. “Education shall be free” much of the language and sentiment of this clause no longer resonates today as it might have in the 1950s. The clause appears to more particularly reflect the frustrations of the middle class intelligentsia who were very influential within the Congress movement at the time. In part this was most probably a specific reaction to the narrow, functional racist approach to education of the apartheid authorities. The Charter goes on to say that access to tertiary education will be “open to all by means of state allowances and The student movement scholarships awarded on the basis of during the 1970s and 80s merit”. Here, there is a fundamental contradiction that surfaces the inherent elitism. If something is “open After the relative political quiet of the to all” there can be no selective 1960s and early 1970s and besides the qualification of access such as 1973 workers strike, it was availability of scholarships based on student/youth struggles related to “merit”. Indeed, given apartheid’s apartheid education that provided a systematic undermining of black renewed spark to broader internal education, merit becomes a resistance as well as the larger discriminatory qualification. The liberation struggle. And, these did not inevitable result can only be that a come from within the privileged few are allowed access, to Congress/Charterist movement. become the next (black) elite. In early 1976, the apartheid state Further, the Charter’s stated aim of decreed that the Afrikaans language education, i.e. “to teach the youth to was to be the medium of instruction in love their people and their culture, to black high schools. In response, a small honour human brotherhood, liberty group of students affiliated with the and peace” is both conceptually narrow new Black Consciousness Movement and practically limited. It appears to (BCM) in Soweto and organised under reflect a somewhat sentimental the banner of the South African Student commitment to a specific kind of Movement (SASM) responded with nationalism and internationalism active resistance and demonstrations. typical of the immediate aftermath of EDUCATION AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 4 When the state responded with violent The 1980s were characterised by wave force, more students and some after wave of student boycotts and residents in and around Soweto went mass protests, marches and on the offensive, culminating in the demonstrations against apartheid massive 16th June demonstrations. education. This, in turn, led to repeated Within a week and after further actions clashes with the apartheid security by many more students around the forces and the mass arrest and country, a total of 136 people were detention of student activists. Every act officially listed as having been killed by of repression was met with resistance the apartheid authorities. In the and drew larger numbers of students ensuing weeks hundreds more into open struggle against the students were killed. SASM was apartheid regime. This spiral of subsequently banned (Marx, 1992). political unrest reached its highest point in the mid- to late-1980s. Neville Alexander wrote: “In the seamless web of South African history, From 1983, the Congress of South the 16th of June 1976 represents both African Students (COSAS) which was an end and a beginning” (Alexander the successor to SASM, alongside the 1992: 25). Written in lyrical style, tertiary-based Azanian Students Alexander argued that: “… the rifles and Organisation (Azaso) which emerged ammunition that laid low Hector out of the BCM and AZAPO-aligned, Peterson and his comrades and that later renamed the South African sent the Tsietsi Mashininis into exile National Students Congress (SANSCO) and the Dan Motsisis into prison put an after it reoriented politically to the ANC, end to illusions that the struggle for became highly active participants in educational equality could be the newly formed Charterist-aligned, separated from the struggle for United Democratic Front (UDF). democracy and eventually from class Education demands were linked to a emancipation” (Ibid: 26). range of other demands in the all-sided struggle against apartheid. The Soweto uprising of 1976 represented the willingness of students In their hundreds of thousands, and youth to more actively engage in students joined workers and other resistance to the oppressions of township residents in all the key apartheid education as well as to the episodes of the mass uprising during apartheid system itself. However, it the early-mid 1980s. These included: was not until the early 1980s that the the mass protests against the Republic broader impact of the uprising would Day celebrations of the apartheid come to the fore. regime in 1981; the massive Transvaal stay-away in 1984; the million- “The Doors of Learning and Culture signature campaign of the UDF in 1984; shall be opened!” This was the popular the nationally-organised protests when slogan of the student movement of the COSAS was banned in 1985; and, in the 1980s. Across the length and breadth of campaign against the dummy tri- the country, almost every leaflet issued cameral elections, over one million or poster mounted boldly carried this students participated in the boycott of slogan. schools and other education institutions. EDUCATION AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER EPC OCCASIONAL PAPER 5 5 Councils (SRCs); low Matric pass rates; and the lack of jobs available for school leavers.