the dream realising realising the dream TITLE.indd 2 2012/03/02 10:21 AM Realising dreams.indd 1 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za ii Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school Crain Soudien the dream realising realising the dream TITLE.indd 1 2012/03/02 10:21 AM Realising dreams.indd 2 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za iii Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school Crain Soudien the dream realising realising the dream TITLE.indd 1 2012/03/02 10:21 AM Realising dreams.indd 3 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2012 ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2380-6 ISBN (pdf) 978-0-7969-2381-3 ISBN (e-pub) 978-0-7969-2382-0 © 2012 Human Sciences Research Council The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’) or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council. Copy-edited by Lisa Compton Typeset by Laura Brecher Cover design by Michelle Staples Printed by [Name of printer, city, country] Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 17 6760 4972; Fax: +44 (0) 17 6760 1640 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by River North Editions, from IPG Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com Realising dreams.indd 4 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Contents Tables vi Foreword vii Preface xi Acknowledgements xiv Abbreviations and acronyms xv Introduction ‘Hey you black man, hey you white woman’: Calling ‘race’ 1 1 Social difference and its history 31 2 The obdurate nature of race 54 3 Creolisation, multiplicity, education and identity 81 4 The racial nature of South African schooling 96 5 Constituting the class: Integration in South African schools 126 6 The asymmetries of contact in the South African school 158 7 Reconstituting privilege: Integration in former white schools 175 8 The complexity of subordination in the new South Africa 193 9 Structure and agency: Young South Africans struggling against history 225 10 Thinking and living our way forward 240 References 247 Index 261 Realising dreams.indd 5 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za vi Tables Table 5.1 Extent of changes in selected schools in five provinces (percent) 139 Table 5.2 Gauteng learners by ‘race’ groups in formerly race-based schools (per cent) 139 Table 5.3 Gauteng learners by ‘race’ groups in public and independent schools (per cent) 140 Table 5.4 Learner demographic profiles 140 Table 5.5 African learners in selected KZN schools (per cent) 141 Table 9.1 High schools by performance in Senior Certificate (Grade12) mathematics 228 Table 9.2 UCT graduation rates, for cohort commencing studies in 2006 and graduating in 2009 (per cent) 229 Realising dreams.indd 6 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za vii Foreword No one could have foreseen the many and complex ways in which racial integration in schools would unfold in the wake of the long period of colonialism and apartheid from which South Africa emerged in the 1990s. Those who studied schools quickly recognised the difference between desegregation and integration. Researchers discovered ways in which social class recast race and the racial experience inside schools. A few found that the walls of schools were highly permeable, as powerful experiences gained in cities, townships, homes, churches, peer groups, youth political organisations and other forming influences carried seamlessly into the ways race took on meaning inside institutions formally established for learning. Others found dominant cultures subduing incoming cultures and, at times, not without the ready participation of the newcomers seeking mobility in a country and a world that privileged particular languages, customs and ways of thinking. For those who studied schools, the many faces of school integration required new and courageous theorising that went beyond the application or borrowing of well-trodden concepts and methods from other settings. Enter Realising the Dream and it will not surprise the reader that Crain Soudien is regarded as South Africa’s foremost theorist of school education. Trained in the sociology of education and with an impressive exposure to leading thinkers in comparative and international education, Soudien brings into conversation some of his, and others’, most important writings on race, class and education since the early 1990s to track the ways in which race, especially, takes its meanings in the experiences of post-apartheid schooling. The versatility of the author in drawing on a vast range of conceptual frames from post-colonialism through new race theories of school and society is breathtaking. That said, Realising the Dream does not make for easy reading, for it requires deep reflection and the revisiting of common sense in our understanding of race, education and society. This is tricky terrain. How, for example, does one talk about race without assigning to it an essentialist and enduring meaning after apartheid? The book takes on this dilemma squarely, and here the interaction between Soudien and Paul Gilroy is especially illuminating in the recognition and deconstruction of race. To take another example, how does the eloquence of theory and its Realising dreams.indd 7 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za viii languages capture the complexity it tries to describe? Here again the author is brutally honest: ‘our theories will always fall short of the realities they seek to encompass’. And how does one account for what appear to be progressive laws and policies only to find them working against system-wide change to benefit the poor and the disadvantaged? In response the author takes us through a stunning array of cases of schools grappling with policy ‘on the ground’ and gives an almost ethnographic sense of how things change, and stay the same. In some ways the cases constitute the centre of the book, and anyone initiate into schools research in this country who is looking for a ready collection and bibliography of the major writings on race and education since the early 1990s would find it neatly contained in this outstanding volume. There is no voluntarism here, but a nuanced account of the choices we make as politicians, policy-makers, parents and students. This sounds harsh, but Soudien is right: ‘African parents, educators and learners were complicit’ in what he calls the ‘structured exclusion’ of black children from the broader social and academic achievements of the school. The question is, why? One cannot dismiss the choices of black parents in favour of English, for example, as simply a false consciousness; that would not only assume the researcher has true consciousness, it is also just sloppy analysis. In a world that privileges English as the language of access, opportunity and status, I find it patronising for the black middle classes to insist that the poor honour mother-tongue education while the well-off happily ensconce their own children inside the cotton-woolled and polite English-medium schools. But Soudien takes another brave step in this regard by not simply accounting for black-into-white school integration but also throwing a critical eye over that other difficult conversation: the ways in which African students experience and appropriate education in former coloured and Indian schools, and how all black students are included and excluded in former white schools. The politics and economics are different depending on which cases of integration you choose to focus on, and this is where even more research needs to be undertaken. This book is also a timely contribution since at the time of writing this foreword High Court Judge Boissie Mbha decided that a former white school in Johannesburg must admit a single black student on grounds that the school cannot use its admission policy to exclude black students. The capacity of the school, ruled the judge, rests with the government even though the admissions policy might rest with the school governing body. However, on closer Realising dreams.indd 8 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za ix inspection the issue is much more complex. First, the school has an enrolment of nearly 50 per cent black students already, so the exclusion argument is thin. Second, the governing body has power over admissions – subject, of course, to constitutional values – and this must be respected. Third, admissions serve in part to determine how many – not only which – students to admit given a set of educational goals (e.g., smaller, more manageable classes). The counter- argument is raised in some detail in the Times of 15 December 2011. My point is this: as schools become more integrated, at what point does exclusion shift from numbers admitted to cultures recognised, from parent control to government interference, from access to quality, from race to cosmopolitanism? More importantly, how does human integration happen inside schools in ways that embrace children, their histories, traditions, beliefs and commitments, behind a powerful model of democratic education? This surely must be the central question in deciding what the common project should be around which we rebuild schools and society. Soudien’s corresponding research programme demands lengthy descriptive- analytical accounts of daily life in schools – of the Philip W. Jackson variety on the hidden curriculum – but this book at least pushes us in that direction with a guarded optimism revealed in the title, Realising the Dream, and, in a memorable turn of phrase, a personal stinger: ‘Ways of being are not in our blood’. Here one of the challenges, recognised briefly by the author, is to trouble whiteness a little more, and certainly beyond the dismissal of race-thinking in schools as white supremacy, a charge so common in angry writing. What about white woundedness, anxiety, fear and retreat? The white evil versus black good narrative of history has run its course, and we need to ask new questions about serious issues such as white guilt and what Chabani Manganyi calls the ‘politics of the defeated’. Take, for example, what has happened in many schools where integration became resegregation, such as the case of an all-white school, nervously embracing the project of open access, becoming an all-black school with low education standards and brutal modes of discipline against pseudo-gangsters on the playground. The most prominent media example of such a school is the former J.G. Strydom High School, renamed Diversity High by the progressive Afrikaner principal. The now black principal in a black school was caught brutalising a black student, beating and kicking the child on the floor of his Realising dreams.indd 9 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za x office. Is this the endgame for integration in working-class white schools like Diversity High? The related challenge offered by Soudien’s work is to explain how the ‘logic of race’ manifests itself in white progressive politics compared to white conservative politics and everything in between. And in this pursuit, the comparison cannot be reduced to English versus Afrikaans school cultures. Finally, in this regard what gives the logic of race such continued currency, with all shades of the epidermis? The answers to these questions are not all found in this book, but Realising the Dream is without doubt a reliable launching pad for deeper inquiry along these lines. The author will no doubt brace himself for a familiar criticism that in focusing on integration the attention is limited to a small number of schools; sheer race demographics imply that the vast majority of South African schools will remain black. That is true, but some of us choose this focus because it is such a powerful barometer of the state of race and race relations in our country, and such a convenient place – replete with children – to try to foretell the future. But here is an interesting challenge for the next generation of race research, and a subject on which the author has advised in the anti-xenophobia film on youth, Where Do I Stand? That is, how are children integrated – or not– with respect to national origins, and with respect to various ethnicities within the black community? We cannot ignore such studies because of the obvious divide-and-rule ideology of apartheid that made many of us as social and educational researchers not pay attention to what were then called the inevitabilities of tribal conflict. Here too the conceptual table is laid by Soudien for productive inquiry in these directions by focusing on how racial identities are formed and deformed, and can in fact be reformed in school. In the end, schools are about learning and the democratic project about ‘unlearning’, as Soudien puts it, the received logics of race. This is the task set in this intriguing new book which every student teacher and teacher educator alike must read. Professor Jonathan Jansen December 2011 Realising dreams.indd 10 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za [...]... have their own global gathering of indigenous peoples and who, understandably, thought they would find in us and in our meeting a group of people who were sympathetic with and kindred in their view of the world They asserted a powerful sense of their own separate identity In an implicit rebuttal of what I was suggesting, the strategic point they sought to make was that they could not sacrifice their... improve the presentation Inga then handed the manuscript over to an editor who subjected it to a linexii Realising dreams.indd 12 2012/03/12 4:48 PM by-line copy-edit, which further benefited the text I would also like to thank the designer for all her wonderful skill in producing the cover for the book Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Speaking of the cover, my daughter Carla worked with the initial... find themselves in this situation understand their ability to live without others – how does one install this sense into the South African psyche? These issues are significant for a number of reasons They are significant in so far as South Africans, like people elsewhere in the world, have the obvious challenge of comprehending the reality of their social interdependence But there is an intensity to these... left for another time But the reason for emphasising ontology is that the world finds itself in a constrained time The general rule for how people should live – the ways in which they should manage themselves and their relationships with one another and to what they should look forward – is dominated by the example provided by Europe and North America Europe and North America, through the historical... in the colonies and the domination of the United States on the world stage, have come to supply the world with the guidelines for how it should be conducting itself At the individual level this comes down to prescribing behaviour, relationships and the life-determining choices people should be making This is the ontological example that the dominance of the ‘north’ represents It has come to supply the. .. construction, as 11 Realising dreams.indd 11 2012/03/12 4:48 PM REALISING THE DREAM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za opposed to all the other bio-engineered terms of colonialism and apartheid Strikingly, this explicit anti-racial register – anti-racial in the sense that social and political movements have emerged and organised in the country around the idea that race is a nonsense – has not found the same... work together to understand the multifarious nature of modern identity and the social differences it catalyses I am suggesting the need to bring these elements of the complexity together to show that social phenomena are not pristine, detached and occurring in isolation As experiences they are always, so to speak, in the ‘company of each other’; they are synchronous, recursive and compounding They are,... to us in the primordial sense Ways of being are not in our blood It is from a desire for attaining this state of awakeness that the title of this book, Realising the Dream, comes The promise of education is fundamentally that of bringing to sight that which ideology obscures Awakeness as the other side of dreaming is about bringing into reality that which is in our imaginations We 7 Realising dreams.indd... The results have been ambiguous It is not, however, the ambiguity that is significant; it is 8 Realising dreams.indd 8 2012/03/12 4:48 PM INTRODUCTION Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za the idea that biology-as-race is what ultimately counts The biological nexus will finally state whether they are ‘of the fold’ or not In this view race and biology are insistently conflated, and in the process the. .. and around us Many of us are in it We live it The prize it 9 Realising dreams.indd 9 2012/03/12 4:48 PM REALISING THE DREAM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za represents for the world, for taking it beyond the small circles of familiarity, is enormous This book is therefore offered as an intellectual and practical response to the dangers that come with the ubiquity of race, race-thinking and its . the dream realising realising the dream TITLE.indd 2 2012/03/02 10:21 AM Realising dreams.indd 1 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za ii Unlearning the logic of race in the. school Crain Soudien the dream realising realising the dream TITLE.indd 1 2012/03/02 10:21 AM Realising dreams.indd 2 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za iii Unlearning the logic of. www.hsrcpress.ac.za iii Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school Crain Soudien the dream realising realising the dream TITLE.indd 1 2012/03/02 10:21 AM Realising dreams.indd 3 2012/03/12 4:48 PM Free