By Emmanuel Mgqwashu
Education can and should change people’s lives. Education systems ought to operate with the public good in mind. But for many South Africans, this is not the case. I would suggest that part of the reason post-colonial and post-apartheid educational policies are not succeeding is because they are biased towards outcomes that are relevant only for and to urbanised contexts. They exclude rurality.
South Africa’s rural population is more than 19 million people strong. Yet one must live, work and flourish in cities in order to find fulfilment as an “educated” individual. People who come from rural areas may however not “fit” or feel comfortable in urban settings, but their degrees may not be easily applied in their own home towns.
The education an accountant receives, for example, does not instil the desire to return to a rural area and help subsistence farmers manage their businesses and finances. Instead, their education encourages students to place more value on a corporate job managing big companies’ finances. This disconnect between educatedness and rurality may be one reason for the country’s graduate unemployment rate.
Against this backdrop, several questions arise: for which “public” are South Africa’s universities educating the younger generation? For whose “good” are they receiving this education? Which “public” receives “the good” out of students’ education?
Colonialism’s “hidden curriculum”
Universities’ ideas of “educatedness”, progress, success and relevance are all underscored by a Western definition of what constitutes a good society (one in which an atomised individual rationally pursues his own selfish good). They do not take into account concepts like Ubuntu – the idea that all people’s well-being is interconnected.
These definitions mean that the type of education graduates receive does not instil a love for the rural communities and contexts in which many of them grew up. They are not left with a desire to live and work in these spaces. This is because there are seeds inherent in the education they receive that have the potential to produce, in the long run, a disgust for rurality. Graduates are left with a bigger appetite for city life.
This, tragically, was exactly what lay at the heart of colonial education’s “hidden curriculum”. Professor Ali Abdi writes that colonial education:
never had, in design or implementation, the interests of the colonised at heart, and even if few of the natives were presumably educated, the objective was, at least at the philosophical point of view, to create a corps … who were only trained to serve as mediating buffer … between the interests of the metropolis and the “illiterates”/“uneducated” colonised millions.
Where the West’s real power lies
When colonialism ended, Africa’s education systems were not revised to draw from local philosophies of education and knowledge generation. Post-colonial policies were not designed with an emphasis on restoring pride, confidence and dignity back to local traditional lifestyles, identities and knowledge systems. Their greatest aim was to increase the number of indigenous populations who received colonial education. This included sending people overseas to receive degrees from Euro