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CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY

In document APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA A thesis submit (Page 173-176)

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

5.4 CONCLUSIONS OF THE STUDY

This thesis has shown that discourses are productive and constitutive in nature. The policy discourses that were analysed in this thesis, therefore, will have an impact on future basic education policy reforms. Considering the scarcity of approaches that take account of basic education policy discourses in post-apartheid South Africa, there is a need to evaluate the conditions that have been produced by these discourses so that new questions can be posed to efforts that will seek to improve the basic education system in years to come. The assumption of future reform efforts should not be seen as the ascription by this thesis to the idea of the policymaking ‘process’ as an epistemological certainty. Drawing on the research of Malpas and Wickham (1995), Higgins argues that for the “activity of government [to remain] thinkable and manageable”, government must “necessarily [be] incomplete and as a necessary consequence must always fail” (2004, p. 459). Put differently, the reproduction of policy problems as a consequence of failing governance in turn legitimates the necessity of governance made intelligible through new policy developments and implementation strategies. Socio-economic inequalities, for example, are more often than not framed by government discourse as policy failures – either current or past. This suggests that within policy reform; within the ‘right’

156 government policies lay the solutions to socio-economic inequalities. ‘Social problems’ then are produced, or perpetuated, by ‘bad governance’ and, therefore, ‘should’ be solved by states – hence the necessity of failing governance to legitimate political rule. Applied to basic education in post-apartheid South Africa, it is necessary to consider the limits of future policy reform efforts which act as legitimators of rule.

The main argument in the first level of analysis was that the tensions between post- apartheid liberal and neo-liberal reasoning resulted, in part through the ‘risk’ strategies that both calculated, the continuation of apartheid’s socio-economic inequalities. ‘At-risk’ citizens remain dependent on the welfare strategy managed by the state, whereas active ‘citizens’

continued to manage their own ‘risk’, frequently opting out of state-run services by employing private service providers. The conditions that have been created by governmental reasoning during the first fifteen years of democracy have given rise, therefore, to unequal subject positions that cannot be reconstituted over a short period. Should the post-apartheid state abandon its neo-liberal rationality and policy of fiscal austerity in the hope of channeling more money to the welfare ‘risk’ strategy and address the inequalities within the basic education system, the subject positions that were created by apartheid reasoning and reinforced by post- apartheid mentalities of rule will both persist and reproduce. According to Lemke,

a political rationality is not pure, neutral knowledge which simply ‘re-presents’ the governing reality; instead, it itself constitutes the intellectual processing of the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include agencies, procedures, institutions, legal forms, etc., that are intended to enable us to govern the objects and subjects of a political rationality (2001: 191).

Put differently, subject positions that are created by governmental reasoning are based on the representation of ‘reality’ by this reasoning and the government policies and practices adopted to ‘manage’ it. Subjects then are constituted to govern according to the political

157 rationality (or rationalities) responsible for their development by functioning within the limits of their subjectivity. In light of the subject positions that were reinforced during the first fifteen years of democracy in South Africa and the extreme inequality between them, the creation of new limits of subjectivity will take decades to establish and will have to contend with existing strategies of government intervention which are aided by, as Lemke points out, institutions, legislation and local practices (ibid).

The study also showed that basic education policy, during the first fifteen years of democracy, deepened the inequalities between former Black schools and former Model C schools. The effects which the funding model had on the maintenance and development of school infrastructure at former Model C schools as well as the enhancement of the expertise of teachers and SGBs at these schools have promoted the idea of ‘active’ self-government. This strengthened resistance to the state interfering with the role of SGBs at these schools. Former Black schools, on the other hand, remained largely dependent on the state for funding and for the supply of teachers. The dual funding model for former Black and former Model C schools have reinforced the ‘necessity’ of a dual policy response by neo-liberal reasoning. This is because fiscal austerity dictates that ‘limited’ resources are available to education and that the state is dependent on both public and private contributions in order for it to increase the subsidisation of former Black schools located in poor communities. The inadequate implementation of C2005, on the other hand, due to the rationalisation policies discussed previously, resulted in the production of poorly educated, mostly Black citizens which did not conform to the neo-liberal conception of ‘active economic subjects’. So, because schools continued to service their immediate communities, and because South Africa remained spatially segregated according to income, the inequalities within the basic education system reproduced socially and fed back into schools.

158 The way in which state framed the reforms to basic education policy in 2010 established the limits of their intervention. Tikly (2010) provides a useful critique of the

‘Education Roadmap’, a report presented to the DBE (Department of Basic Education) in 2009.

Despite employing the rhetoric of social justice and critiquing the inequalities within the basic education system, the Roadmap suggests market-based solutions to the crisis within basic education, informed by neo-liberal thinking. Tikly argues that this is precisely what neo-liberal governmentality is able to do, that is, “its ability to bind itself to multiple political projects in contradictory ways” (2010, p. 7). Because neo-liberal reasoning is the dominant rationality in post-apartheid South Africa, it limits the ability of basic education policy to conceptualise solutions outside of governmental reasoning. As long as government is informed by a neo- liberal mentality of rule, basic education policy is to a large extent limited to its logic for solutions. Furthermore, the social conditions created by governmental reasoning and by basic education policy during the first fifteen years of democracy justify, as the White Paper on Education and Training put it, the necessity “to pursue policies that treat different groups of people in somewhat different ways” (DoE 1995b, p. 71).

In document APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA A thesis submit (Page 173-176)