Rediscovering the pedagogy of possibility

Universities are confronted by renewed privatisation, intensive marketisation and a challenge to the very notion of the university as a mechanism for addressing social inequality and facilitating the circulation of knowledge. Increasingly, universities are recast from a public to a commodified sphere, with students as consumers and staff as sales consultants replete with corporate values and corporate planning frameworks. In the face of mass unemployment, aligning skills to the competitive global ‘new knowledge economy’ has become the obsession of most nation states.

Solidarity and learning that addresses the self to public life and social responsibility to robust public participation and democratic citizenship is marginalised. Subjects and disciplines that have a purchase in the marketplace are valued more highly, even as critical education scholars have challenged dominant market capitalist orthodoxies that have become ascendant in framing understandings about the relationship between higher education, society and the economy (Ivor Baatjes, Salim Vally, Carol Anne Spreen, 2012).

Academic capitalism

Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades (2004) address academic capitalism whereby academic staff are channelled into entrepreneurial ventures as part of the university’s income-generating ethic and the embedding of universities within the logic of academic capitalism. The relevance of academic work is linked to productivity as measured by rating and ranking scales.

The theory of academic capitalism aims to explain the integration of the university into the global economy, more specifically how faculty, students, administrators and academics use “a variety of state resources to create new circuits of knowledge that link higher education institutions to the new economy” (Slaughter and Larry L Leslie, 1997). It reflects the encroachment of the profit motive into the academy, and represents “a shift from a public good knowledge/learning regime to an academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime” where students become consumers and institutions the marketers (Ibid).

Jane Kelsey (2008) notes how the international trade, investment and economic architecture such as the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services, and provisions in other regional and bilateral agreements, have been driven by a rapidly growing corporate global educational services sector including some universities. This development further commodifies education and limits emancipatory possibilities.

Fourth Industrial Revolution

An increasing number of university administrations ardently promote the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Rasigan Maharajh, 2018). While technology and the development of technological skills are important, Terry Bell cautions “but not within the existing economic system and the political and social framework that sustains it”.

We also need to equip students to ask critical questions (including about the political economy of technology itself, and the pedagogical and social implications of educational technology) which they can only do through critical consciousness, to engage in democratic debate and make informed choices about social priorities.

Undoubtedly, despite these negative developments globally, progressive spaces, while constrained, do exist in the academy and individuals in many universities are able to connect with community organisations and social movements and accomplish valuable counter-hegemonic work. Often these spaces have been won through struggles supported by student organisations, staff unions and associations, and by pressure from organisations outside.

They must be expanded through a vigorous defence of higher education as a public good and a sphere of critical democratic citizenry, and resistance against commercial and corporate values that shape the form, purpose and mission of our institutions. The emphasis on technical rationality, simplistic pragmatism and undemocratic managerial imperatives must be countered. Proactively, initiatives should include linking programmes, projects and resources to community needs and struggles.

Skills mismatch argument

A legion of commentators largely employed by financial institutions, tediously feed South Africans a daily diet of market fundamentalism through the print and electronic media. Their mantra is usually a permutation of the following clichés: 'We must be competitive and entrepreneurial'; 'We need more skills'; 'Education fails to provide young people with skills for employment'; 'We need more investment and economic growth' (Vally and Enver Motala, 2014).

Rarely do we hear dissenting voices, and the simplistic statements and platitudes of these ‘experts’ are seldom challenged by journalists.

In a situation of mass unemployment and inequality this pre-emptive discourse is seductive, playing, as it does, into the anxieties and ambitions of both parents and young people. Sears (2003:78) argues that: “Students facing a dismal market are likely to be more sympathetic to the idea that education should provide them with competitive advantages. Parents may have some sympathy for [this discourse] as they seek out opportunities for their children to succeed … Vocationalism is a central means by which education is being reoriented towards the market. The goal of lean schooling is to teach students how to realise themselves through the market, both by marketing themselves and meeting their needs through the market.”

This seemingly common-sense approach places the burden of responsibility squarely on individuals and their ‘deficits’ while obscuring the real obstacles to procuring decent and remunerative employment. The “transition from school to work” (Alan Sears, 2003) problem is then simplistically reduced to inadequate career planning models and the lack of “entrepreneurial skills”. The common sense view is promoted as neutral, objective and ideology-free.

The emphasis placed on the relationship between education (schooling and post-schooling in the main) and the economy is invariably about how education and training, both at the individual and systemic level, can enhance the possibilities for jobs. It is regarded as both a consequence of economic development through the growth of the economy, and as necessary to stimulate and enhance the very possibilities for aggregate economic growth through education and training.

In this view, the main proposition is the idea that there is a great shortage of skills in South African society which is accentuated in particular “critical areas of shortage”, making any possibilities for economic advancement unimaginable and that the education and training system is hopelessly out of sync with the demands of the local and global economy. The cause of unemployment, in general, is put at education’s door, more broadly arguing that education is not teaching what the economy needs.

Structural problem

It is unfortunately true that many children and youth in South Africa leave school without the basic skills necessary for life and work. But as Steven Klees explains: “The mismatch discourse is usually less about basic skills and more about vocational skills. The argument, while superficially plausible, is not true for at least two reasons. First, vocational skills, which are often context-specific, are best taught on the job. Second, unemployment is not a worker-skills supply problem, but a structural problem of capitalism.” (Vally and Motala, 2014)

While focusing on education institutions and the supply side, the more useful and important question is the demand side one, usually ignored by human capital theorists, regarding how we can create decent jobs that require valuable skills. The human capital discourse also ignores the value of education outside of work.

Siyabulela Mama’s recent article on the skills mismatch argument is pertinent: “…South Africa has been flooded with a number of retrenchments recently with capitalist enterprises like ArcelorMittal South Africa, Hulamin, Group Five, Basil Read, MultiChoice, Sibanye-Stillwater, Tongaat Hulett, Standard Bank and Absa and others shedding jobs.

“Amongst those who are retrenched here are highly skilled workers with no jobs to go to in the foreseeable future and this shows that in the current system, even skills cannot protect you from unemployment and poverty. Yet the explanation of why this is happening hides the real causes of it because the acute problem of youth unemployment (including graduate unemployment), which is supposedly one of the biggest priorities in the country, is usually and falsely assigned to a lack of skills and work experience which is also blamed for poor economic growth.

“We need to respond to the question of how – in addition to the broad and multifaceted purposes of learning for social justice and citizenship – education and learning can support the development of useful livelihoods and income generation, based on collective and cooperative work that is socially useful and necessary for sustaining and reproducing societies and protecting the environment.”

Pedagogies of possibility

Today, besides facing an unprecedented ecological crisis brought about by unbridled capitalist exploitation of our planet (which some have called the Capitalocene instead of the Anthropocene – Jason Moore, 2016), progressive struggles must contend with other serious challenges as the latest wave of nationalist, racist and pseudo-populist politics seek to divide and rule communities and countries already fractured by years of social and economic upheaval, repression and growing inequality.

These political agendas divert attention away from the real causes of today’s social and economic problems.

As scholars of education and participants in many struggles for change in recent decades, many of us sense – and most certainly, hope – that notwithstanding the anti-intellectualism that sometimes permeates communities and broader society, that new generations of young people, dissatisfied with inadequate explanations for the state of the world, are seeking ways to change it.

I have encountered many young people who are hungry to learn how activist-scholars envisioned alternatives and possibilities, all as part of developing their own political, social and environmental activism – a major motivation for writing our book History’s Schools – Past Struggles and Present Realities (Choudry and Vally, 2019).

An unjust world is not inevitable. The praxis of all the movements I mentioned earlier gave rise to many possibilities which although often tentative, could have been developed further.

In some cases, clear alternatives were squandered. For example, on the question of the ‘clustering’ of schools, Alexander, working with progressive urban planners, published a book entitled Taking South African Education out of the Ghetto: An Urban Planning Perspective, (Smit and Hennessy 1995) in which a detailed plan for overcoming the spatial apartheid nature of the city of Cape Town, acting as a pilot for other cities in South Africa, could be approached.

The plan argued in considerable detail how the establishment of well-equipped schools at important nodal points on the main transport arteries of the city could enable “all children, regardless of colour, language group or place of residence” to attend such schools. Alexander (2010: 8) lamented that:

“Although complimentary copies of the book were made available to some individuals in the new bureaucracy, and the approach was discussed with and positively received by cabinet ministers and urban planners involved in rethinking the apartheid city in Cape Town, it had very little impact at the time because of the timidity and tentativeness, ie lack of clarity and vision, that characterised the first years of the transition.”

Beyond boundaries

Alexander was also exasperated by the lack of support he received around the importance of mother-tongue instruction and the development of historically marginalised languages. There were many other frustrations encountered and as a country we are impoverished as a result. Alexander’s approach was the idea of concrete alternatives and demonstrable possibilities in the present. His was an approach that went beyond social critique and academic analyses – beyond the boundaries constructed by the requirements of conventional scholarship, since engagement was inseparable from serious scholarly activity.

For Alexander the academy had the responsibility to stimulate activism and democratic practice both through the rigorous production of knowledge and the practice of teaching, and also its accountability to communities.

Another example is the possibilities produced by the “education with production” movement. It held the view that education can bring together the worlds of intellectual and physical labour, and overcome the separation of “head and hand” that characterises so much of the present education and training discourse separating the academic from the vocational.

A leading proponent of education with production, Patrick van Rensburg, after returning from exile bemoaned the fact that: “Whereas in the past, liberation movements in Southern Africa had radical visions of broad socio-economic and political policy, and of education systems that would promote and serve them, today the various governments they gave rise to have almost all settled for the prevailing neo-liberal realities of a global free market…South Africa seems now to hold alternatives in contempt, seeing them as beneath its dignity as an advanced industrialised country." (Van Rensburg, 2001)

Several implications flow from the points I have raised as they relate to unemployment, poverty and inequality. We need to explore more fully the relationship between the alternative livelihoods, citizenship-based, cultural and solidarity economy activities in which especially the most marginalised sections of society are engaged, together with the learning that takes place in the alternative activities of such communities.

Such an exploration would provide a stronger theoretical, practical and organisational basis for a more robust and meaningful curriculum – not determined by the requirements of capitalist labour markets but by the requirements of a democratising society.

Moreover, the alternatives suggested relative to work and learning should be consistent with progressive ways of thinking about sustainable planetary ecology. Given the urgency of dealing with climate change an eco-pedagogy is also necessary.

The education philosopher Maxine Greene (1988), in her seminal book The Dialectic of Freedom, suggested as early as 1988 that the purpose of education was to provoke individuals to deal with serious social issues, yet “…little is done to counter media manipulation of the young into credulous and ardent consumers…[and] that human worth depends on the possession of commodities, community status, a flippant way of talking, good looks…In the face of all this, school people are asked to increase academic rigour, ensure the preparation of a work force for ‘high technology’…Confronting some of the most tragic lacks in society, some of the saddest instances of dehumanisation, they offer promises of ‘career ladders, ‘board certification’,… talk resembling what Kundera calls ‘kitsch’”.

The pressure of competitiveness, marketing pressure and the seduction to own the latest car, biggest house, the temptations of conspicuous consumption not helped by the example of yesterday’s struggle icons, is great.

So how can educators empower young people to see through the deception and glitz, to see the values of solidarity, justice, the fight against discrimination and inequality as the primary ones. How can educators open students to the possibility that there may be more fulfilment to be discovered in living in a just society where “enough is as good as a feast”, than living in an arrantly inequitable one? How can we help to recognise the violations in the continuing violence against women, children, LGBTI+ people and those we deem ‘foreign’, scapegoated because of politicians’ incompetence?

What it means to be an intellectual

Donaldo Macedo (2005:11), in his introduction to The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, writes that in his work and in his life, Paulo teaches us and the world – with his hallmark humility – what it means to be an intellectual. As always, he teaches us with his penetrating and unquiet mind the meaning of a profound commitment to fight social injustices in our struggle to recapture the loss of our dignity as human beings. “We need to say no to the neoliberal fatalism … informed by the ethics of the market, an ethics in which a minority makes most profits against the lives of the majority. In other words, those who cannot compete, die.

“This is a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics. I do not accept . . . history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse.”

In forging meaningful alternatives and possibilities for education today means we often have to look back.

I have just read a book by Karim Hirji titled Under-Education in Africa: From Colonialism to Neoliberalism. The book recounts how after independence, students together with some progressive staff members such as Walter Rodney, John Saul and others contributed to making the University of Dar es Salaam a beacon of progressive scholarship. They championed decolonisation and while critically supportive of President Nyerere’s humanism and policies of Ujamaa, also warned of the dangers of neo-colonialism – their critiques celebrated as the “Dar es Salaam Debates” remain germane to revitalising the African academy today.

The legendary magazines they produced, Cheche and MajiMaji, should be seen as exemplars of socially engaged and rigorous scholarship exposing the poverty of many academic journals today. It is a remarkable collection and in these bleak, dire and precarious times, with constant assaults on reason and education for liberation, it is an antidote to despair.

Hirji’s injunction not to lose hope is also a clarion call to action and a firm belief that, to quote Hirji, “…the struggle is a long term one; there are bound to be ups and downs. But ultimately, Africa and its people will triumph”.

Professor Salim Vally is director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation and the NRF-SARChI Chair in Community, Adult and Workers' Education at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. This is an edited extract of his professorial inaugural address, “Between the Vision of Yesterday and the Reality of Today: Forging the pedagogy of possibility”, delivered at the university in September. He is co-editor with Azia Choudry of a forthcoming (2020) book, Universities and Social Justice, Pluto Press.