Bounds of Democracy pdf

Its main theme is a concern that the understandable enthusiasm for democracy in South Africa in the 1990s has undermined the idea of expertise in Higher Education.. Prioritising characte

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Foreword iv

Abbreviations viii

institutions in South Africa 87

Since the 1970s Wally Morrow’s voice has provided a vigorous and independent commentary on educational policy and practice in South Africa In this collection of essays, which spans a period from the late 1980s to the early years

of the new century, he turns his attention to teaching in higher education

issues before, during and since the transition in 1994 to a democratic order

is the conflict between strong populist views of democracy and the nature of Higher Education, and consequent necessary conditions for it to flourish Its main theme is a concern that the understandable enthusiasm for democracy

in South Africa in the 1990s has undermined the idea of expertise in Higher Education Higher Education, Morrow argues, cannot be democratic Framing the defence of academic practice in the essays in this collection is the

metaphor of bounds, a concept that reflects an ambiguity that Morrow sets out to

illuminate On the one hand, our thinking about Higher Education is bounded

in the sense of being limited by certain kinds of corrupting assumptions about the relationship between education and democracy On the other hand, the defence of academic practice demands that bounds be set against the intrusion

of assumptions and practices that threaten to undermine it Deliberation about education is both inevitably bounded by its past and present contexts, and in need of a capacity to resist elements of that context that set boundaries on imagining new ways to conduct academic practice in the future

Each essay in the collection reflects these concerns Essay 1, ‘Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world’, responds to the idea that values education is about the development of character, understood as a ‘stable disposition of individuals’ Prioritising character in our understanding of education, it argues, threatens to bind us to a form of individualism that is integral to instrumental rationality, making it difficult for us to retain a sense

of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, and to talk

of other goals – like patriotism Instead, Morrow urges us to focus on the educative practice of discussion in thinking about values in education.Essay 2, ‘Varieties of educational tragedy’, discusses the bounds placed

on Higher Education by simplistic thinking about equity Concentrating

attention on liberation, understood as the elimination of poverty, distracts us from paying proper attention to the need for economic development Instead

of being correlative, equity and development are in tension and need to be balanced Yet educational policy in South Africa is driven by considerations

of equity and redress, which tend to be privileged above other considerations

If we lose sight of the values of Higher Education, Morrow warns, we will be left only with post-secondary education Educational tragedy looms when simplifying choices are made

The potential for tragedy lurks in other educational fashions and fads Essay 3,

‘Epistemic values in curriculum transformation’, takes the reader closer to the argumentative heart of the collection While curricular content does need to be modified, our debates about this process tend to be bounded by the rhetoric of transformation and reform, often premised on the assumption that any change must be good But only some kinds of curriculum change would represent

an improvement and they should be grounded on epistemic values, which

constitute the grammar of academic practice as disinterested inquiry

Essay 4, ‘Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education’, turns the argument to ways in which reflection on Higher Education is bounded not only by new fads, but by aspects of the traditional culture of Higher

assumption that Higher Education institutions can only be competitively independent, this traditional model is enormously expensive Massification

of Higher Education requires thinking in different ways about how to provide

it Breaking down these boundaries leads towards open learning, to teaching

as resource-based learning

Essay 5, ‘Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom?’, was a

academic freedom from the ‘marketisation’ of Higher Education While one possible understanding of academic freedom might cast it as in conflict with democratic principles, Morrow’s argument is that a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom Drawing on an intricate discussion of ‘truth’ and its significance in educational practice, he shows that what is constitutive of academic practice must be distinguished from what is instrumentally valuable There follow two essays widely read and hopefully influential since their earlier publication Essay 6, ‘Entitlement and achievement in education’, can

be read as a comment on the bounds set by protest politics on the possibilities for moving beyond the conditions that provoked struggle politics While it has become popular to think that Higher Education is simply obtainable by the demands of agents, such demands misunderstand the role of agency in achievement Epistemological as against formal access depends not only on teaching but also on the efforts of the learner Too strong an emphasis on entitlement undermines academic values and the achievement of becoming a participant in academic practices ‘In the same way’, writes the author, ‘as no one else can do my running for me, no one else can do my learning for me.’

In ‘Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions

in South Africa’ (Essay 7), Morrow defends higher education institutions against the ambiguous democratic demands of stakeholder politics for the transformation of universities Academic practices cannot be egalitarian; they are not transparent and senates are the appropriate governing bodies of universities In a warning that might equally be directed at the reduced power

of senates that has accompanied the growth of corporate, executive university management, Morrow observes that if we lose a sense of the role of senates then we will lose our sense of higher knowledge and Higher Education.Essay 8, ‘Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education’, poses the question: what is Higher Education for? This essay warns that modern societies depend on Higher Education and, if we lose our understanding of higher knowledge, South Africa’s aspirations to become a modern society will not come to pass; such knowledge cannot be bought off the shelf To deny the distinction between higher and other kinds of knowledge undermines Higher Education, which must be distinguished from post-secondary education Morrow’s argument is that the function of Higher Education is to constitute, distribute and generate higher knowledge

The collection concludes with a final essay on provision: ‘Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa’ While different ways of delivering Higher Education have become commonplace, we need to think more clearly about how we are to deliver Higher Education, to rethink teaching itself This requires liberating ourselves from the assumption that it must include face-to-face contact But in South Africa our interpretation of the distinction between distance and contact provision, as well as competition between universities, inhibits our understanding of possible future models

Morrow’s exploration of the transformation of Higher Education in South Africa – the social forces driving it, and the demands and conceptual limits

of change in education – demonstrates the profoundly practical nature

of philosophical treatment at its best By focusing on key concepts like transformation, democracy, stakeholders, character and open learning, Morrow probes the theoretical foundations and dogmas that either bound or could enable the liberation that the passing of Apartheid promised His analysis deploys among its tools careful treatment of essential distinctions: between warrant and acceptability (Essays 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7), discussion and conversation (Essays 1 and 5), knowledge, propaganda and power (Essays 2 and 5), rejection and refutation (Essays 7 and 8), rights and privileges (Essays 5 and 6), academic work and ideology (Essays 5 and 7), Higher Education and Further Education (Essay 8) and contact and distance education (Essays 4 and 9)

There are, Morrow shows, no comfortable certainties, except perhaps the inevitability of shallow thinking This leading commentator on South African education has again illustrated the urgent need for systematic philosophical inquiry into educational questions, especially teaching His probing examination of the presuppositions that underpin our educational discourse exemplifies the very academic practice that this collection so resolutely defends

2 Co-presence refers to teaching situations in which the teacher and learners are present

in the same place and at the same time.

3 During a visit to the Political Science Department at the University of Cape Town in

1986 the Irish politician, writer and academic, Conor Cruise O’Brien, criticised the academic boycott The student protests that followed led the university to suspend his lectures and he was asked to leave There followed intense debate about the nature and place of academic freedom.

SAUVCA South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association

Cultivating humanity in the

A good reason to launch the public debate ‘Values, Education and Democracy

in the 21st Century’ at this time in our national history is the pervasive sense

of an as yet unfulfilled hope that the transition in South Africa would lead to the growth of a new patriotism This hope has as one of its sources the struggle against despotism in South Africa and the civic–republican conception of

democracy embedded in the Freedom Charter It was also vividly expressed

in the extraordinarily sweeping shared optimism that characterised the first general election on 27 April 1994

But now, nearly seven years down the path, we find ourselves in a society drifting towards greed and competitive individualism, where market forces seem to override all other social ties, a society incrementally characterised by the selfish pursuit of individual or sectional interests and worrying signs of the perpetuation of the historical divisions which we hoped would have been overcome in a democratic society In spite of gargantuan efforts to transform what is a key public institution in any democracy, education, and in spite of the generation of educational policies which are internationally admired, many of our educational institutions remain in the doldrums, with deep demoralisation among teachers, and pupils and students who seem to be motivated more by a sense of entitlement than by a commitment to the ideals

In the light of these disappointments the Values in Education Initiative is particularly welcome This initiative is an attempt to foster a public debate about our shared values – values that should bind us together as a particular historical community and shape our individual and collective identities Values with this kind of potency are not founded by coercion or legislative fiat; they emerge gradually, if at all, out of community life But ongoing discussion amongst morally responsible agents, who share a sense of a common history and a common fate in an uncompromisingly competitive globalising world, can serve as a catalyst The current conference is one moment in that discussion and, arrogantly assuming that I am a ‘morally responsible agent’, this essay is conceived as a contribution to that discussion

It begins by drawing attention to two significant features of the definition of

It then picks up on some attractive thoughts from Gandhi about the relation between education and character-building and claims that – appealing as these ways of talking might be – they do not enable us to confront the main enemy, which in this essay I shall call instrumental rationality The essay concludes with a few comments about teacher education in relation to competences and commitments, and discussion and epistemic values

Character-building

The Report states that, ‘By values we mean desirable qualities of character such

as honesty, integrity, tolerance, diligence, responsibility, compassion, altruism,

There can be little dispute that honesty, integrity and so on are ‘desirable qualities of character’ and that they are qualities which we should try to foster

in our schools and other institutions But what I want to draw attention to here

is the eccentric idea that ‘values’ are ‘qualities of character’ It is clear that this

is an exceedingly limited definition of ‘values’, one that leaves no logical space for most of the significant uses we have for this word How, for example, could

we in these terms explain our thinking of the value of, say, education itself, or mathematics or music, or the value of shelter, food and drinking water to those mired in spirals of poverty It cannot help to say that this definition is offered

only for the purposes of this Report The Report is a public document that is

supposed to launch a public debate about values, education and democracy,

and a restricted definition of this kind is likely to skew that debate in an unsatisfactory and, perhaps, self-undermining direction.

But there is a related issue here, one that will shape the remainder of this essay

If we prioritise ‘character’ and ‘character-building’ in our debate about values and education, in the context of a democracy in the contemporary world, we are likely to provide a hostage to what is arguably the main corrupting force

in education at this time The problem is that ‘character’ is naturally conceived

of as a stable disposition of individuals To highlight the development of

‘character’ in a discussion of values in education is, thus, implicitly to reinforce

a particular social ontology; one that is based on the idea that a society is a contingent collection of human individuals who happen to find themselves living in the same geographical space By a social ontology I mean a map

a range of possibilities of how we might address the issues that face us, especially those possibilities harbingered in the civic–republican conception

of democracy we find expressed in the Freedom Charter Before I develop

this central point further, I want to take a detour via the thoughts of one of the early heroes in the struggle against the colonial oppression that was the precursor to Apartheid

Gandhi is an example of a thinker who forges an indissoluble link between education and the development of character And although his voice comes from a historical and cultural context that is in some ways radically different from ours, he was concerned with some problems that remain familiar to us

in our world, and his thoughts are, for this reason, likely to remain relevant for

us He was concerned, for example, with how to achieve social cohesion in a diverse society characterised by deep historical divisions, with how to protest effectively without using violence, with how to escape the debilitating tentacles

of colonialism, and with how to alleviate poverty and foster development in the increasingly borderless modernising world We can accept that problems

of this kind provide the frame in which we need to think about education in our context

Gandhi says, ‘There is something radically wrong in the system of education

might be envious of the moral boldness of this claim, a boldness that is difficult for us to retrieve after a century of horrors perpetrated by regimes, some of which, it must be said, were driven by strong moral convictions We

find ourselves in a world in which difference is celebrated, and the relativist moral and political theories that support this stance have generated doubt about traditional moral certainties.

Persistently over a period of three decades, Gandhi conceived of ‘arming’ boys and girls for the ‘fight’ against social and other evils by ‘building character’ We can note that he seems to take for granted that ‘character’ is always positive – he does not seem to acknowledge that there can be bad character as well as good

In 1909 we find him saying that while he was in prison he read a great

deal – from Emerson and Mazzini to the Upanishads – and discovered that

they ‘all confirm the view that education does not mean knowledge of letters

aim of all education is, or should be, the moulding of the character of

considerable appeal to us in our situation as we consider the state of our society and hover uncomfortably between the two poles of shallow thoughts about child-centred education, and the distressing persistence of discipline

by violence and authoritarian modes of teaching To reorientate ourselves towards character-building might seem to offer us a way of navigating between these two poles

However, without digging further into Gandhi’s thinking, one comment

we might make about his emphasis on character-building as the primary aim of all education, is that it has a tendency to undermine the centrality

of the development of knowledge in our conception of education It thus has a tendency to make it difficult to maintain a conception of education as something different from ‘the prescription of a worthy set of homilies about

missionaries and teachers, advocacy and education We might be concerned about the ways in which such a view, in the wrong hands, can itself be an open sesame to some of the worst abuses of schooling: self-righteous moralising, indoctrination, corporal punishment and authoritarian forms of imposition

But despite these caveats many of us, like the Report, no doubt find some

comfort in the idea that re-emphasising character-building as a central aim

of education might be a way of countering the drift away from the hoped-for new patriotism Part of the appeal of this idea is that it resonates with the common-sense view that intellect and character are two of the central features

of human beings, features that can come into conflict with each other The leaders of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany were not, in general, lacking in

compatible with a morally degenerate character

But the deeper problem, as I previously said, is that to prioritise character

in this way in our understanding of education can commit us to a form of individualism that is itself integral to the way of thinking which makes it so difficult to articulate a defensible view of patriotism in the contemporary world We can call this way of thinking ‘instrumental rationality’

Gandhi was also concerned with instrumental rationality and the ways in which it undermines the value of education The following quotation from

his book True Education might almost have been written as a comment about

the current situation in education in South Africa:

The real difficulty is the people have no idea of what education

truly is We assess the value of education in the same manner

as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange

market We want to provide only such education as would enable

the student to earn more We hardly give any thought to the

improvement of character of the educated The girls, we say, do

not have to earn, so why should they be educated? As long as such

ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value

Instrumental rationality is a tightly knit web of beliefs, conceptions and practices and there can, of course, be various ways of characterising it One way would be to show, as Gandhi does above, the ways in which instrumental rationality is the guiding philosophy of markets, and that one of its symptoms

is rampant consumerism and an obsession with measuring the value of anything – from art to sport and entertainment – in terms of money But another way, and one that is more fruitful for our purposes here, would be to say that at the root of instrumental rationality stands the assumption that the appropriate way to analyse actions is as means to some end This assumption

can, then, be extended into the view that the value of actions is to be assessed

in terms of their consequences, the ends to which they are directed

Instrumental rationality

The story is somewhat crudely outlined here, but it provides us with enough

of a framework to understand how – if we prioritise character-building in our account of education – we provide a hostage to a way of thinking that makes it difficult for us to talk of patriotism In briefly elaborating this theme,

I shall make three comments that might serve to enrich our understanding of instrumental rationality

The first is the ways in which instrumental rationality was a principal driving force of the scientific revolutions of 17th- and 18th-century Europe, which still shape our high opinion of the importance of science in society and our educational curricula There is a widespread conviction that science is

‘useful’ – that is, that it will enable us to overcome problems with which we are confronted The value of science, in short, is popularly conceived of as instrumental rather than intrinsic

In the light of the overwhelming success of science and its technological applications in addressing the practical problems of how to improve human life on this planet, and the ways in which the scientific enterprise is shaped

in the form of instrumental rationality, it would be simply naive to repudiate instrumental rationality The problem, as has been frequently enough pointed out by, for example, Greenpeace and the ecological movement in our own day, is how to prevent the spread of instrumental rationality beyond its appropriate sphere, how to fight against the powerful tendency to think that instrumental rationality is the paradigm for all rationality and the master ruler for the measurement of all value The problem can be expressed as that

of how to prevent the inclusion of the word ‘all’ in the basic assumption that the way to analyse and evaluate actions is as means to some end As soon

as instrumental rationality becomes imperialistic, it can drain our lives of significance, as the earlier quotation from Gandhi indicates, and shut out the conceptual space in which we can make sense of some of our crucial values, especially those constitutive of our democracy A main source of this problem

is that instrumental rationality can be, and typically is, presented as neutral, and this takes me to my second comment

Instrumental rationality can be presented as value-neutral because in starting from the distinction between means and ends, it can claim that all values or value judgements are ultimately evaluations of the desirability of the ends The value of the means is derivative from that, and can be assessed according

to how effectively the means achieve the end

The next step is, then, fairly obvious We assess the value of the ends or the consequences themselves in terms of the extent to which they satisfy the desires

of human beings But the desires of human beings are essentially the desires of individual human beings, which might sometimes contingently overlap Thus

we discover two of the deeply embedded bulwarks of instrumental rationality: individualism and subjectivism, or (if we take into view the possibility of contingently overlapping individual desires) relativism Far from being value-neutral, instrumental rationality is itself an expression of a particular theory of values, one which claims that all values are ultimately the subjective

preferences of individuals; whatever people de facto desire is desirable In

the contemporary world this theory of values is so deeply entrenched that it seems self-evident And this leads to a third comment

Contemporary forms of globalisation are saturated with instrumental rationality that insidiously seeps into every aspect of our private and public lives, from the most intimate to the most communal, and prompts us into seeing everything in terms of instrumental values Underwritten by this enveloping influence, instrumental rationality and its assumption of individualism and subjectivism becomes a social ontology, stipulating the range of possibilities for social policy, including education The supposed value-neutrality of instrumental rationality makes it especially seductive in a diverse world dominated by value-skepticism

To prioritise character development in our discussion about values and education is to risk falling into this trap, making it difficult either to retain a sense of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, or to talk about patriotism without sounding merely romantic and self-righteous Promoting character development comes across as a faint-hearted rearguard action after the high ground has been conceded to instrumental rationality, and in this way it risks merely reinforcing the imperialistic pretensions of instrumental rationality

Attempts to counter instrumental rationality

Faced with the same kind of problem, the National Council for Teacher Education in India has recently published an ‘Initiation Document’ that has interesting implications for the ways we think about teacher education in our

context The document is called Competency Based and Commitment Oriented

Teacher Education for Quality School Education,14 and the title itself gives a clue

to what its main thrust will be To think of teacher education in terms merely

of teacher competence, as is currently internationally fashionable and as is deeply embedded in recent education policy in South Africa, is to lose sight of the essential template for any professional education

The document outlines ‘ten competency areas’ and ‘five commitment areas’ These ‘commitments’ are definitively conceived of not as a supplement to the main work of teacher education, but as its very rationale: ‘It is this commitment component that plays a decisive role in effective teacher education … fostering professional commitment among teachers must become an integral

interpreting the shift that is made here is to say that while the concept of competence can harmonise neatly with instrumental rationality, the concept

of commitment pulls away from that framework

Two of the commitment areas are especially relevant to our concerns here:

(4) Commitment to achieve excellence – that is, care and concern for doing

everything in the classroom, in the school and community in the best possible manner and in the spirit of ‘whatever you do, do it well’ or the do-it-

well attitude; and (5) Commitment to basic human values – including the

role model aspect comprising genuine practice of professional values such

as impartiality, objectivity, intellectual honesty, national loyalty, etc with

These views can encourage us to step out of instrumental rationality but, like character development, they also risk trapping us in the form of individualism integral to instrumental rationality Commitments are ordinarily understood

as individual rather than social The irreducibly social dimensions of our problem get swallowed into the dominant social ontology in which society

is conceived of as nothing more than a collection of individuals driven by instrumental values

Discussion: A way to think about values, education and democracy

in a globalising world

To bring this essay to some kind of conclusion (the issues raised here are profound and cannot be solved in a few words), I shall make a few comments about our loss of a sense of the value of education and its replacement by an impoverished and short-sighted view in which its only value is instrumental

I want to make the strong claim that the practice of discussion, as a specialised form of conversation, should serve as the centre of gravity in our thinking about values, education and democracy in a globalising world in which we would like

to give impetus to the emergence of a new patriotism The practice of discussion

is strongly opposed to instrumental rationality and its theory of values

Discussion shares some of the features and conditions of conversation Conversation is a definitive way in which human beings relate to one another and make a human life together One of the conditions for conversation is an absence of systematically antagonistic or unequal relationships between the participants Conversation presupposes a participatory relationship between those who are party to the conversation; they acknowledge one another

as fellow human beings sharing common human feelings, vulnerabilities, sympathies and hopes A conversation is characterised by mutual ties of recognition and concern and, at least temporarily, a shared interest

Conversations and discussions are not sharply distinguishable from each other, but in a discussion there is a stronger sense of discipline, and this provides the key to the conceptual relationships between discussion and education and discussion and democracy

Discussions have a much more definite subject matter, a much clearer purpose and, thus, stronger principles of relevance, than other kinds of conversation And it is such characteristics that illuminate the conceptual link between discussion and discipline

Currently in South Africa, perhaps because of the priority of negotiation in our recent history, but perhaps as a subliminal trace of communal ideals, there are frequently references to dialogue and debate The view I am putting forward here is not unsympathetic to these ways of talking Dialogue and debate are themselves two specialised forms of discussion, but they have shortcomings in the light of the strong claims I want to make for the practices

of discussion Dialogue still seems to presuppose (at least two) preformed individuals (or parties) interacting with each other; debate assumes prior rival or conflicting views about some matter In appealing to the more generic concept of discussion, I want to emphasise a critical characteristic of discussion that might be occluded in these other ways of talking.

Discussion has a seminal role in human life; it constitutes a human world, and

is itself educative For these reasons discussion, is a central concept in both a civic–republican conception of democracy, and to a proper understanding of education and the development and acquisition of knowledge

Central to a civic–republican conception of democracy is the principle that disagreements and conflicts in the society will be solved by discussion rather than by dogma, violence, propaganda or other forms of manipulation or sheer power Education for citizenship in such a democracy must have as one of its primary aims the development of the capacities, including the virtues, to participate in discussion

Paulo Freire’s dialogical conception of education points in an appropriate direction Dialogical education is contrasted with traditional education, which is characterised as ‘monological’ But both dialogical and monological seem to presuppose that the voices are expressing the views of individuals, or categories of individuals In terms of the view I am attempting to articulate here, this presupposition is not sufficiently social The problem is not so much with Freire’s thesis, but with popular interpretations of that thesis Discussion

is essentially social, and is in strong opposition to an instrumental conception

of human life and education Discussion is educative in the sense that it has the potential to transform our prior opinions and, over time, to reconstitute not only our opinions, but our very identities as well Discussion is the principal way in which humanity is cultivated

Knowledge itself is an outcome of a kind of discussion called inquiry This kind of discussion includes not only contemporary or local participants and

is characterised by specialised forms of discipline shaped by the definitive goal

of finding the truth about some matter This is why the distinction between warrant (or evidence) and acceptability (or mere agreement) is so central to the disciplines of inquiry

Like other forms of discussion, inquiry is irreducibly social – it is possible only

in communities of inquiry Its general disciplines are familiar enough: tolerance,

respect, impartiality, diligence, openness, justice and courage Values such as these are constitutive of the practice of inquiry; they are internal to that practice, and are distorted if we try to force them into the frame of instrumental values The intrinsic values which make inquiry the practice that it is can be called epistemic values They are the shared values of communities of inquiry, and are misunderstood if interpreted as merely subjective or relativist In practice, different fields of inquiry and different communities of inquirers embody epistemic values somewhat differently (the disciplines of history are different from the disciplines of physics), but any field of inquiry, by definition, is constituted by epistemic values.

The ideals of education are necessarily tied up with epistemic values, and this must be a key dimension of any debate about values and education Of course,

we must acknowledge that education also has important contingent effects such as the empowerment of learners, the amelioration of social and political problems (e.g the spread of HIV/AIDS), or the fostering of a new patriotism, but we lose a sense of the value of education or inquiry if we confuse their contingent effects with their constitutive values

Learning how to be a participant in communities of inquiry is at the heart of what

we understand by education, and in education we can have no higher goal than

to try to improve the success of our formal institutions of learning in enabling learners to develop the sense of the values that guide the practices of inquiry Such values are not merely an add on, an optional extra, to the practices of education and inquiry; they are at their core It is not merely intellectual abilities that are involved here; it is the full humanity of learners, a humanity that links them to other human beings and not only those in their local surroundings

And these provide good reasons for saying that if we are concerned with the fate of our country in the contemporary world, we will do well to emphasise discussion in our public life, and to foster and nurture the disciplines of discussion in education and, because of its seminal role in shaping our future, in the education of school teachers Unlike character development or commitments, important as these are, this cannot be interpreted as merely a sentimental supplement to the main business – it is the main business itself And it has more promise in fostering a spirit of social solidarity and, perhaps, even a new civic pride and patriotism that can resist being interpreted as instrumental values

1 This essay was published in Spirit of the Nation: Reflections on South Africa’s

Educational Ethos, edited by Kader Asmal and Wilmot James, published in 2002 by

New Africa Education and the Human Sciences Research Council for the Ministry of Education Reprinted with permission.

2 Seneca, On Anger, quoted in M.C Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, Cambridge

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998, p xiii.

3 The Department of Education of South Africa, Values, Education and Democracy in the

21st century, report of the Working Group on Values in Education, 2000 Subsequently

referred to as the Report.

4 The Report, p 10.

5 See ‘Irreducibly social goods’ in C Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995.

6 M Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, New Delhi: National Council for Teacher

Education, 1998, p 18.

7 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p 2.

8 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p 26.

9 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p 9.

10 Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p 17.

11 The Department of Education of South Africa, Report of the History/Archaeology

Panel, 2nd edition, January 2001b, p 6.

12 Wouter Basson, allegedly, was an apartheid-era germ warfare expert

13 In Gandhiji, Gandhi on Education, p 1.

14 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School

Education, ed D.N Khosla, New Delhi: National Council for Teacher Education, 1998

15 Competency Based and Commitment Oriented Teacher Education for Quality School

Varieties of educational tragedy

(Prepared for the Inaugural Conference of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust: ‘The Political Economy of Social Change in South Africa’,

1–2 April 1997)

A classical view of tragedy

The conventional classical (Aristotelian) theory of tragedy is (crudely) as follows: the hero – conceived of as a good person of strong character – is faced in a particular situation with a cruel choice between two actions that are in conflict with each other To choose one is to repudiate the other The hero finds herself, for example, in a situation in which she has either to defile the statues of the gods or kill her child; there is no escape from this dilemma, and whichever she chooses is not only, in effect, a rejection of the other, but in itself an evil It is a terrible thing either to defile the statues or to kill her child, but circumstances force her to do one or the other

We need to notice that this view of tragedy presupposes a moral order; a background of shared goods that makes it understandable why the choice is tragic Furthermore, that moral order, if it is coherent, does not consist in a set of logically incompatible goods; the hero is faced with not a theoretical but

a practical dilemma, one that has direct consequences in the real world The real world is itself complex, and human beings are neither angels nor beasts; they are moved by both principles and passions The tragic conflict arises in a particular historical situation, as an outcome of the unfolding of a contingent set of human and natural circumstances

there is also a different understanding of tragedy in the classical tradition Here the tragedy consists not in an inescapable clash between accepted goods, but in the breakdown of moral order as such The deeply shared agreements and practices that provide the framework for all our moral judgements and moral principles, and even our human character, no longer hold and, ‘There

is simply nowhere to turn The foundation has undergone corruption … We are confronted here with the total disintegration of a moral community, the slippage and corruption of an entire moral language.’ The play itself depicts some horrifying acts of cruelty and revenge, and concludes with the actors crawling about on the stage naked and on all fours (i.e no longer human) This play has had, according to Nussbaum, a mixed reception in the tradition, partly because it does not conform to the classical view of the structure of a tragedy But, as Nussbaum remarks, ‘This alarming story of metamorphosis arouses and explores some of our deepest fears about the fragility of humanness …’

Moral dilemmas and their relationship to tragedy

In the post-Kantian world, morality is widely understood as a set of universal moral principles such as freedom, respect for persons, equality and truth-telling Such principles are conceived of as quite different from scientific laws Both moral principles and scientific laws might explain events, but moral principles not only explain human action, they also guide and shape

it Moral principles are thought of as providing the foundation for our moral judgements of the actions of others and ourselves, as well as for guiding our moral conduct and shaping the practices and relationships in which this conduct is embedded

But, because there is more than one moral principle, they can clash This possibility, familiar in our everyday lives, was fruitfully exploited by Lawrence

were told stories in which an agent is faced with a conflict between two moral principles and then asked what the agent should do For example,

a poor man’s wife is dying but there is a medicine that can save her life Unfortunately, he does not have the money to buy the medicine, he has no friends or family who can lend him the money, the pharmacist refuses to give him credit, and so on, but he can steal the medicine What should he do? We can see a formal similarity between this kind of everyday dilemma and the conventional classical theory of tragedy

Kohlberg used the responses children made to this and similar stories to work out which of the conflicting principles they see as more important

He discovered some interesting, if highly contested, norms that show how

at different stages in their moral development, children assess the priorities between various principles differently

As soon as we acknowledge that there is more than one moral principle – for instance, the three principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of the French Revolutionaries – then it is highly likely that situations will arise

in our individual and collective lives in which we will be confronted with conflicts between our principles Such conflicts give rise to moral and political dilemmas and, sometimes, the need for agonising, or even tragic, choices Some such choices will shape the future course of our individual or collective lives This is especially striking in the political realm, including education The view that the principles of Liberty and Equality can come into conflict with each other has been at the root of some of the bitterest political disagreements since at least the time at which they were highlighted in the French Revolutionary war cry (echoing many theorists, we might note, with regret, the way in which the prioritising of the conflict between Liberty and Equality has pushed Fraternity to the margins) It is commonly argued that Liberty and Equality are in serious tension with each other so that, to the extent that either principle is prioritised in political policy, the other will suffer

Debates about this tension are legion, with some participants denying the tension and claiming that Liberty and Equality are two sides of a single coin, but others insisting that these principles inevitably conflict with each other and that prioritising one or the other has shaped whole world orders in the forms of Liberalism and Socialism There are others who argue that the distinction between Liberalism and Socialism has become anachronistic in the late-20th-century world Whatever we make of these debates, what has been, and is, perceived as a conflict between these two principles has deeply structured the political worlds in which we now find ourselves and, by some accounts, underlies major political tragedies

The constant possibility of conflicts, some of them with tragic consequences, between moral principles can explain the repeated attempts to avoid moral dilemmas by simplifying the moral world There are, abstractly, three possible manoeuvres here One is to refuse or simply fail to acknowledge the complexity

of the world and its human inhabitants – a form of moral blindness Another

is to claim that morality consists of a single overriding principle, with all other so-called principles relegated to the status of contingent rules to be accepted

or rejected in the light of the single fundamental principle And the third is to claim that we can rank various moral principles in advance so that whenever there is a conflict between any two principles, one of them will always take precedence

Moral blindness might, in some situations, have tragic consequences The accusation of moral complacency, the standard fare of religious and political revolutionaries, is a call for us not to avoid moral dilemmas by refusing

to recognise them as such But it is nevertheless true that for much of our time we participate in the traditions, shared practices, and human and other relationships which constitute our lives with little need for a vivid awareness of the possibility of moral conflict Indeed, too vivid and constant an awareness

of this possibility might not only disrupt the normal flow of our lives, but also cripple our actions with constant guilt, self-doubt and moral agony, and mire

us in political paralysis We cannot lead our ordinary lives in a neurotic state

of constant moral mobilisation

Utilitarianism is an example of an attempt to avoid moral dilemmas by claiming that there is a single overriding moral principle – ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (in its Benthamite version) – which is the supreme principle in terms of which to assess not only particular choices but all policies and action-guiding rules This simplifying strategy was taken by its committed proponents into the world of political policy and it profoundly shaped the subsequent course of political developments, not only

in 19th-century England, but also in the many parts of the world influenced

by the British Empire In our own day, more or less sophisticated versions

of Utilitarianism still flourish in the decisions and actions of vast numbers

of ordinary people and in the pages of popular magazines and academic journals This is a symptom of a deep longing for a simpler, purer, moral universe, one that is not vulnerable to potentially tragic choices between conflicting principles

Although there are other possible cases, the most familiar example of the simplifying manoeuvre of ranking principles in advance of a consideration

of the details of actual situations is that of privileging equality over freedom

or vice versa What is distinctive of the ranking manoeuvre is that it acknowledges the separate significance of the conflicting principles This manoeuvre simplifies our moral and political choices, and thus enables us to avoid dilemmas with tragic proportions, but at the possible cost of blunting

our perception of the consequences of our choices and, as the disputes between Liberalism and Socialism signal, being the cause of tragedies of a different kind

Indeed, such simplifying manoeuvres can all potentially lead to tragedy Moral blindness in political leaders has characterised some of the most terrible political regimes, as the example of Hitler might illustrate The conviction that some single moral principle that can purify the world has, at last, been discovered, has given rise to some of the most horrifying and tragic episodes

in history, as the examples of Robespierre and Stalin might illustrate

Attempts to refashion the world so that its inhabitants become angels, who face no moral conflicts and tragic choices, are more likely to turn them into beasts Simplifying manoeuvres are more prone to undermine than to transform the moral world they are so earnestly bent on purifying And in the field of educational policy, the myopic pursuit of a single goal can contribute

to the disintegration of the educational world Simplifying manoeuvres have

a questionable history as effective ways of avoiding tragedy

Harold Wolpe on equity and development

Apartheid was an oppressive political regime rooted in inequality In the struggle against it, the elimination of inequality understandably became the overriding and unifying goal of the liberation movement Liberation itself was largely understood in terms of the elimination of inequality ‘Development’ was not prominent on the agenda, appearing, perhaps, in demands for

‘redistribution’, ‘redress’ or ‘transformation’ – all understood predominantly in terms of greater equality Perhaps an explanation for this lacuna is the ways in which the movement nurtured exaggerated visions of South Africa’s material riches and, thus, underestimated the need for economic development

This is, of course, an instance of what I have called a simplifying manoeuvre Given the historical context and lack of an expectation that a dramatic transition was imminent, it is understandable The movement was driven

by a single, overriding and apparently transparent principle of equality The success of a popular resistance movement rests not on its recognition of the complexities of the political world, but on its intense concentration on what

is widely understood as the main issue

But when liberation movements attain political power, the need for economic development comes insistently onto the agenda, and this has become obvious

… political movements, liberal and socialist, coming to power in the post-1945 period shared the following in common: ‘they set themselves the double policy objective of economic growth and greater internal equality’

In such liberation movements the ‘organisational cement’ was ‘the notion that the twin objectives of economic growth and greater equality were correlative’ And the ideological statements of both liberals and Marxists asserted that

‘growth leading to catching up and an increase in egalitarian distribution are parallel vectors, if not obverse sides of the same coin, over the long run’ Development was ‘supposed to mean greater internal equality, that is, fundamental social (or socialist) transformation’

Wallerstein goes on to argue against this understanding of the relation between equality and development:

They are not necessarily correlative with each other They may

even be in contradiction with each other

And this contradiction:

… is deep and enduring What has happened since 1945 and

especially since the 1970s is that this contradiction is now a glaring one, and we are collectively being required to make political

choices that are quite difficult and quite large

In the context of education policy debate in South Africa, early signs of doubt about ‘history’s smooth and liberal path’ began to emerge in the National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI) reports of late 1995; and it is here that

movement

comments about the work of the NEPI research groups These comments revolve around two main issues One is the way in which equality tends to

be treated as a largely quantitative notion, with the consequent underplaying

of its qualitative aspects (equity replaces equality, and is ‘defined as improved

distribution of educational resources to disadvantaged communities’ [p 11]) Another is that, when equality is understood in this undifferentiated way, the relationships between equality and development cannot be adequately taken

on board: ‘Which social inequalities are to be targeted and with what goal will depend on the path of development adopted’ (p 13)

For such reasons, ‘… in many cases the research groups’ assessments of alternative education policies accept “equality” and “redress” without qualification, implying a simple progress towards equality’ (p 14) The challenge is issued in the following stark terms, courageous in that historical context:

The tension between ‘equity’ and ‘development’ goals was brought

to the notice of the research groups by the Editorial Group

in February 1992 The essential point made was that policies

aimed at meeting popular demands for equality in some spheres

tended, given scarce resources, to contradict policies geared towards

economic development or growth, even when the latter were aimed

at producing the means to achieve equality in the future (p 14,

author’s emphasis)

The various research groups responded differently to this challenge Some

‘contested the distinction’, ‘others acknowledged it but concentrated on

“equity” ’, and yet ‘others tried to transcend the distinction’ What we can see here is the research groups hanging on to the ‘organisational cement’ referred to by Wallerstein: the notion that the twin objectives of equity and

development are correlative, perhaps interdefinable

The thesis that equality and development cannot be collapsed into each other and are in inevitable tension is more fully elaborated in the seminal paper by Badat, Wolpe and Barends, ‘The post-secondary education system: Towards

The paper argues strongly for a proper recognition of the unavoidable tension between the goals of equality and development, and proposes that a balance will have to be sought between these two kinds of goals In effect, this is

an argument against the simplifying manoeuvre that unified the liberation struggle: treating the principle of equality as the single overriding principle,

in terms of which to define or assess development or any other objectives In developing its main argument, the paper offers a critique of various proposals that privilege either equality or development over the other, or suggest that

they should be historically sequenced (first equity then development, or first development then equity) In the terms used earlier in the current essay,

these are arguments against attempts to rank these two objectives in relation

to each other

On the one hand it is imperative to accept that equality demands in terms

of access and institutions cannot be relegated to some future period when development has, so to speak, occurred There are two reasons for this: the goal of equality motivated the struggle against apartheid and continues to

be an extremely persistent and pervasive demand; and there is no guarantee, given the circumstances under which transition is occurring in South Africa, that ‘development’ will also entail redistribution and a secular trend towards ‘general’ equality The paper reminds us, however, that we cannot ignore the need for human resource development, even where this results

in privilege for some, because in both the short and longer term, economic development creates conditions providing for ‘the possible enhancement of

the conditions of the people even if this does not also generate greater equality’

(p 11, author’s emphasis)

The paper warns us that:

… a failure to recognise that equality and development, as

simultaneous social objectives of the PSE [post secondary

education] system, stand in a relationship of permanent tension, has the potential to result in purely populist or pragmatist

positions which ultimately may advance neither social equality nor economic, social, political and cultural development (p 2)

The paper also recommends that a ‘balance’ needs to be found between the two objectives:

… it must be understood that in so far as both equality and

development are prized, but also exist in a relationship of

permanent tension, the challenge … is clear: ‘to find a path which

to some extent satisfies both demands as far as existing conditions permit’ (Wolpe, 1992) That is to say, a viable policy for the post secondary education system has to balance equality policies with development policies To the extent that such an approach is the outcome of a democratic policy process, enjoys broad legitimacy and contributes effectively and simultaneously, to equality and

development, the consequence of this which is a relative slowing

of the process of equalisation as well as a relative slowing of the

processes of development would appear to be a small price to pay

(pp 13–14)

The paper forces us to acknowledge that equity and development are independent and equally important objectives of the education system, but that they inevitably come into conflict with each other and so confront us with policy dilemmas It forces us, in other words, to recognise that we are

in a complex field, which we simplify at the risk of achieving neither equality nor development To regard either as overriding is more likely to undermine than to transform the educational system This complexity is acknowledged

as follows:

Clearly then, a range of tensions exist between the equity–

development objective and within equality and development goals; trade-offs are implied, and difficult political choices entailed (p 13)

Although we can see here much that echoes, at least in formal terms, what

I argued in my discussion of moral dilemmas, there is also a noteworthy difference Moral dilemmas are conflicts between moral principles, but

‘development’ does not immediately strike the ear as an example of a moral principle We can note that in the documents discussed above, ‘equality’ and

‘development’ are referred to not as ‘principles’ but as ‘objectives’ or ‘goals’ This difference signals the different kind of discourse Harold Wolpe brought into the debate; a discourse constructed around a conflict theory of history.Harold Wolpe was seminally involved in challenging the simplifying manoeuvre

of the liberation movement, the heady and fundamentally romantic rhetoric that became prevalent in the discourse of resistance and critique in education That this challenge was timely can be seen in the educational dilemmas and tensions that have emerged over the past year or two And that this challenge was well grounded can be seen by briefly considering Marx’s ‘tragic view of

Marxist roots: The tragedy of history

paragraph, which picks up on a number of issues already raised in the

current essay and enables us to glimpse the deeper roots of Harold Wolpe’s analysis, and his insistence on the inevitable tension between equity and development:

Modern social and political thought has inherited two

fundamental values from the Enlightenment: a belief in human rights and human dignity, and a belief in human progress or

human destiny Marx’s theory of history emphasizes that these fundamental values of modern political consciousness historically

have been and still are in irreconcilable conflict Marxism is

noted among Enlightenment theories of human progress for

emphasizing that this progress is unavoidably painful and ridden (p 36, author’s emphasis)

conflict-In passing, we can note the difference between understanding the complex legacy of the Enlightenment as having given rise to a conception of morality

as a set of (potentially conflicting) fundamental principles, and understanding

it in terms of having given birth to two fundamental values that are in

irreconcilable conflict ‘Human progress’ is not a principle, but a belief that is embedded in a theory of history

One of the purposes of Vogel’s paper is to ‘… examine Marx’s complex attitudes towards ancient Greek slavery and early capitalist accumulation and conquest …’ (p 36) We find here some surprises, some might even say paradoxes ‘The writings of Marx and Engels on ancient slavery and early capitalism are very difficult to interpret consistently’ (p 37) On the one hand, they devoted their lives and work to the liberation of the working class, as the oppressed and exploited class in industrial society but, on the other hand, they ‘emphasize both the necessity and desirability of even human slavery in promoting human progress’ (p 37)

Engels claims that in ancient Greece the ‘introduction of slavery under the conditions prevailing at the time was a great step forward’ because ‘Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery no Roman Empire’ (p 37) Echoing Engels’s style, Vogel says that for Marx and Engels,

‘Without ancient slavery no Plato, no Praxiteles, no Parthenon’ (p 39),

‘Without ancient slavery no Aristotle, no Assembly, no Academy’ (p 41), and notes that ‘paradoxically, one of the achievements that (ancient) slavery supported was the democratic Athenian Assembly’ (p 39)

The underlying view here is that significant human progress, which fosters the conditions for the extension of human rights and human dignity, is achieved precisely in contexts in which human dignity and human rights for the many are overridden In the modern world all of us are beneficiaries of systems

of exploitation that we condemn, but we would not have those benefits

tragedy of history Human progress and development have depended on ‘the extorted labour of the many’ (p 41) and oppressively non-egalitarian systems Marx displays both ‘horror at the vast suffering involved and wonder at the potentialities for human development that resulted’ (p 39)

… without the development of modern industry, which crushes

children ‘beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital’ we

would lack the material basis and social agent able to achieve a

fully human social order … and this, for Marx, is the tragedy of

history (p 40)

It is part of Marx’s tragic understanding of history that human

development cannot be furthered without the sacrifice of innocent

people who can never be given the reason why All such actions are both ‘sickening to human feeling’ and ‘necessary if mankind is to

fulfil its destiny.’ (p 47)

This poses the moral dilemma (which Vogel discusses) of what our attitude should be to the irreconcilable conflicts between human rights (like equality) and human progress (development) in a contemporary situation What should we do ‘if placed in the middle of certain tragic events in human history’? (p 55) Should we be prepared to sacrifice some human rights in favour of human progress, which, in the longer term, will create conditions for the fuller realisation of human rights? The South East Asian ‘Tigers’ provide

an illuminating test case for reflection about this moral dilemma

In effect, Harold Wolpe recommends a solution to this dilemma He is opposed to any manoeuvres that simply avoid it, and recommends that we

should seek, and maintain, a balance between equity and development As the

arguments in the seminal paper already cited bring out clearly, he is opposed

to the idea that we can solve the dilemma by privileging either objective (i.e

by treating one or the other as overriding) or by sequencing them in time

We must pursue both simultaneously, even if a consequence of this is ‘… a

relative slowing of the process of equalisation as well as a relative slowing of the processes of development …’.

For Harold Wolpe, equality and development are two fundamental objectives jointly important in developing morally and politically justifiable educational policy But they are in tension with each other, and this generates the dilemma that forces difficult political choices on us It would be a serious misunderstanding to read his thesis as merely pragmatic – a concession to populist political pressures In the conclusion to the paper cited we find

an acknowledgement of politics as the art of the possible, but his main recommendation is highly principled, with deep theoretical roots in the ‘tragic theory of history’

It is to Harold Wolpe’s enduring credit that he articulates the dilemma in such a way that we can appreciate its force without having to have a deep understanding of the theory of history in which it is rooted, and the continuing relevance of his argument about the independence of – but inevitable tension between – equality and development is amply demonstrated in some aspects

of contemporary South African education

Equity, scarce resources and the fragility of the practices and

institutions of education

As a way of drawing this essay to a conclusion, I shall briefly reflect on some aspects of contemporary South African education in the light of the previous discussions

In broad terms, the main thrust of education policy has been driven by considerations of equity, as well as ‘redress’ and ‘redistribution’ There are many examples of this tendency, but I shall mention three, by way of illustration

• The agreement of teacher : pupil ratios of 1 : 40 and 1 : 35 for primary and

secondary schooling respectively, as national norms, to which provincial governments need to conform by 2000

• The prominence of ‘redress funding’ in higher education funding

• The dominant view about the governance of both the system and the

institutions of higher education

Given the limitations on the availability of state finance for schooling, the high proportion of the education budget spent on teachers’ salaries, and the

blatant disparities in teacher–pupil ratios between the schooling systems we have inherited, it seems transparently obvious that we needed to achieve some kind of parity of ratios in a unified system This has led to the need for ‘rationalisation’, especially in Gauteng and the Western Cape, and many thousands of teachers have ‘taken the package’ While understandable, this has dealt a serious blow to the project of the reconstruction and development of education For example, it is widely reported that many of the teachers who have left the system are those with the most experience and we need to press the question of whether it was indeed rational for us to adopt a policy of

‘rationalisation’ based on an arithmetical conception of educational equality,

rather than to try to find a way of balancing equality and development, which

would have required mutual compromises

Again, given our history, it is understandable why ‘redress’ is seen to apply

to historically black institutions, but it is a serious error to see equitable financing as the sufficient condition for achieving equality between such institutions Institutions are complex entities, held in place not merely

by material resources, important as those might be, but also by dynamic traditions of practice and shared understanding built up over long periods of time The dangers are made clear in this observation:

It has been repeatedly pointed out by foreign observers that once

the institutions of quality education have been undermined it is

very difficult, if not impossible to rebuild them A key question

here is whether a modern economy such as ours can afford to

follow the path indicated without compromising the whole fabric

The National Commission on Higher Education tried patiently to construct a system of governance for higher education and its institutions that balanced the demands of stakeholders with the recognition of special professional expertise The 1996 Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation rejects the balanced compromise recommended and swings definitively towards more egalitarian systems of governance that effectively sideline professional expertise This is merely one instance of the ways in which, across the realm of education, from the development of the new curriculum to the South African Schools Act (No 84 of 1996), professional teachers and academics are treated,

at best, as equal stakeholders amongst a range of others It is clear that these are symptoms of the prioritising of equality above other considerations, and

the question needs to be pressed, again, about whether this can indeed be in our longer-term collective interest in development

The central problem in all these cases is the way in which the privileging

of equity – regarding the principle of equality (understood, unfortunately,

in myopic arithmetical terms) as overriding – threatens to undermine the basis of the possibilities of development The narrow path followed leads us towards the breakdown of the educational order as such, and arouses some of our deepest fears about the fragility of education In their different ways, each

of these cases raises the spectre of educational tragedy

It is at our collective peril that we fail to understand that educational resources and goods cannot be conceived of as commodities which, like cash or food, for instance, can be simply redistributed by political fiat or market forces The most crucial educational resources and goods we have at our disposal are competent and committed teachers and stable and successful institutions Such resources and goods are much more fragile than is commonly imagined, and if we lose them they cannot be replaced, at least not in the short term

To the extent that current policies eliminate or destroy good teachers and institutions, we would have ignored the warnings given to us by Harold Wolpe and decreased our chances of developing into a country in which the quality

of life of the majority of our people can be improved

It is a shallow and myopic educational policy that proceeds as if the simplifying manoeuvre of distributing the material resources for education more equitably will accomplish either equality or development Harold Wolpe’s view is a bitter pill we need to swallow:

… human resource development, even where this entails the

privileging of a certain layer of the educational and occupational structure, cannot be neglected because in both the short term and

in the long run, economic development constitutes a necessary,

if not a sufficient, condition for the possible enhancement of the

In the undiluted pursuit of equity we might squander the very goods we seek

to redistribute, and an educational tragedy looms Equality of educational poverty is quintessentially equitable, but it is hardly a future we should wish

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Johan Muller in the preparation of this paper In addition, and especially, I acknowledge Roy Crowder for reworking the concluding section

Notes

1 M.C Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1986, pp 397–421 (the specific quotations come from p 404).

2 See, for example, L Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, New York: Harper & Row,

1981.

3 I Wallerstein,‘Development: lodestar or illusion’ in Unthinking Social Science: The

Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, Cambridge: Policy Press, 1991 As quoted and

discussed in pp 6 and 7 in the paper cited in Note 6 below.

4 In emphasising the role of Harold Wolpe in this paper, I have no intention of underplaying the contribution of those who worked with him.

5 National Education Policy Investigation, The Framework Report, Cape Town: Oxford

University Press, 1993, pp 12–15.

6 Saleem Badat, Harold Wolpe & Zenariah Barends, ‘The post-secondary education system: Towards policy formulation for equality and development’, Education Policy Unit, University of the Western Cape, May 1993.

7 Jeffrey Vogel, ‘The tragedy of history’ in New Left Review, 220: 42, 1996.

10 Peter Kallaway, ‘Reconstruction, reconciliation and rationalisation in South African politics of education’, unpublished paper, 18 February 1997, p 16.

11 In Badat et al., ‘The post-secondary education system’, p 11.

Epistemic values in curriculum

transformation

(First published in 2003) 1

The meaning of cemeteries

During a recent job interview one of the applicants, when asked about curriculum change, said that, ‘Trying to change a curriculum is like trying

to move a cemetery.’ This marvellous analogy, intuitively plausible and illuminating, is worth a pause as we launch into yet another discussion about social science curriculum reform

For many people cemeteries have special significance: they are sacred, not merely places in which we deposit the physical remains of the dead, and humility and reverence are the proper attitudes to adopt when we enter them For some people a cemetery is holy ground, and the desecration of graves or gravestones is a most serious violation, much more serious than, for instance, drawing graffiti on the walls of a university Cemeteries are the repositories of precious traditions and memories, some personal some communal, and they are links not only to past relationships and shared lives, but also, for some people, to life hereafter Cemeteries are historical, memorials of human lives once lived, places in which to reflect on the brutal fact that human beings have limited lifespans, but also to wonder at the fragility and preciousness

of human lives and the achievements of departed heroes If we think of cemeteries in Belgium and Flanders, with thousands of identical white crosses

in impeccable neat rows, each standing for the life of a healthy young person cut short by conflicts not of their own making, then we might reflect on the ways in which cemeteries can be texts from which we might learn the harsh lessons of history But even ordinary cemeteries are symbols of the pervasive power of history in human life and the importance of the sacred to us, even if

we left religion behind in our rebellious adolescence When I lived in London during the 1960s, one obligatory pilgrimage was to Karl Marx’s grave in

Highgate Cemetery Perhaps in times to come Zwide Cemetery will achieve a similar status, with people visiting Govan Mbeki’s grave as a way of honouring one of the pre-eminent heroes of the victorious struggle against Apartheid.Moving a cemetery is always difficult and problematic – always characterised

by passionate conflict, anxiety and resistance Even in cases in which there are what appear to be overwhelming practical reasons to do so, it is always contentious Why is this? The explanation lies in what I have already said about cemeteries and the place they hold in our lives Cemeteries are sacred – they are one of our most potent symbolic bridges between the past and the present – and to move them is to dishonour the dead

The interesting thing about this is that reasons of this kind cannot be weighed

in the same scales as the reasons we might have for wanting to build a new road or a housing estate for the poor Building a new road or a housing estate might be pragmatically incompatible, and could be in direct competition with each other for, say, money or land But, although building a new road and moving a cemetery might be pragmatically incompatible with each other, there is nothing like direct competition between them A competition presupposes some neutral rules or criteria in terms of which the competition can be adjudicated But there are no such common rules or criteria in the case

of trying to decide whether to move a cemetery to build a new road Those who want to preserve the cemetery probably see the road builders as basing their view on a shallow and short-sighted form of instrumental reasoning which, although fashionable, ignores a precious dimension of our conception

of human life; but those who want to build the new road are inclined to see those who want to preserve the cemetery as irrational The two sets of reasons are incompatible with each other; they are ‘incommensurable’ in the sense that there is no higher principle – of, say, finance, rationality or justice – in terms of which we could weigh them in the same scales

The difficulties of changing a curriculum

Let’s now turn our attention to the analogy with curriculum and changing a curriculum For some people a traditional curriculum is indeed held as sacred, with humility and reverence as the proper attitudes when we enter them Curricula, at least some of them, are also seen by some acolytes as repositories

of precious memories and traditions, as texts from which we can learn the

lessons of history Curricula, especially but not only in the social sciences, are bridges between the past and the future And any traditional curriculum will be, in some measure, a celebration of the work of what are currently understood as the heroines and heroes in the relevant field Opponents of a curriculum are likely to say it is little more than the storehouse of dead texts,

or of the work of dead white males – such as Emile Durkheim or Max Weber – whose power is to thereby extended beyond their graves

Changing a curriculum is always a difficult and problematic project – one likely to arouse conflict, passion, anxiety and resistance And this is likely to

be the case even when there appear to be overwhelming practical reasons to

do so The endless debate about curriculum change is a symptom that we are here faced with conflicts in which the contending parties are appealing

to incommensurable sets of reasons, which make it impossible to reach a conclusive decision; there is no win–win solution: at least one of the rival parties will have to abandon its principles

There are additional considerations that we can add here for why curriculum change is difficult One of these is that any current curriculum embodies a set

of intellectual habits and routines that has become comfortable for those who teach that curriculum At a deeper psychological level, committed teachers’ self-images and professional identities, and their fundamental convictions about the values and standards of academic practice, are likely to be deeply embrangled with the curriculum they teach To ask them to change the curriculum is, in effect, to ask them to develop a new professional identity and probably also, in their eyes, fatally to compromise their standards, and

to abandon their arduously acquired understanding of the disciplines and significance of the academic practice they teach Unlike simply changing one’s clothes, these are far from easy kinds of change to accomplish, and the more so if the reasons offered for change seem to be irrelevant to what they understand to be the purpose of academic work and the defining mission in their professional lives As Thomas Khun once remarked, a paradigm shift sometimes has to await the death of the old professors

But not all curriculum change is as traumatic as this implies As in the case

of any changes, there are many degrees and speeds of change Some changes are merely cosmetic, others are more radical; some changes are accomplished gradually, and others more swiftly These variations apply, too, in the case of curriculum change Those who call for ‘curriculum transformation’ usually

have in mind a profound and abrupt change of the curriculum – perhaps analogous to a political revolution In a sense, it is not that they aim to move the cemetery, but to eliminate it; not to reform the curriculum, but to replace

it with something completely different There are three comments we can make about such a radical suggestion

First, the radical change of a curriculum is much more difficult to accomplish than might be imagined by the revolutionaries One reason for this can be found in debates about what has been called ‘the hidden curriculum’ Over

has been shaped by a well-known distinction between the explicit and the

‘hidden curriculum’ The explicit (or official) curriculum is constructed around formally stated content or outcomes, such as the ‘knowledge, skills and attitudes’ of the National Qualifications Framework What learners actually learn, however, includes much more than that It also includes ‘… the unstated norms, values, and beliefs that are transmitted to students through

embodies a tacit framework of meaning, a grammar seldom explicitly spelt out, which is below the level of articulated consciousness, but which shapes what is learnt in far more profound ways than the explicitly formulated outcomes or content There is a clear analogy with learning a language When

we learn a language, we learn its vocabulary and rules of syntax, but we also learn its grammar which, although it might not be formally spelt out in the contexts of acquisition, provides the generative frame for being able to speak and understand the language To change the grammar of a curriculum is far more difficult than merely changing the titles, topics, content or internal sequence of our learning programmes

Second, except at a rhetorical or polemical level, there is no direct link between the degree and speed of curriculum change and its significance or importance

It is possible that gradual changes, each relatively minor, could be at least

as significant as some major and rapid transformation Indeed, ‘curriculum transformation’ always runs the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water Part of the reason for this lies in the inherent conservatism of practices, and the extent to which our current practices are the ground for intelligibility

It is far from clear that the dramatic introduction of vaunted transformative Curriculum 2005 into the South African schooling system has achieved any improvement in schooling for the majority of learners

Third, and this follows from the previous comment, curriculum change is not by definition beneficial and, as social scientists, we need to be wary of the rhetorical force of words such as ‘reform’ and ‘transformation’ The tendency to think that any change must be good no doubt arises out of bitter experiences

of colonialism and Apartheid, and the liberation struggles against those forms

of oppression During those struggles the view flourished, understandably, that any change was better than what we then had This view tended to be transferred into the sphere of curriculum change, perhaps because of the significant role played by students in that struggle But, on sober reflection, it

is clear that only some kinds of curriculum change represent an improvement The climate of the times inclines us to be blind to the principle: if it ain’t

But whatever we mean by ‘curriculum change’, do we in reality have any choice about whether or not to change our Higher Education social science curricula?

Pressures to change Higher Education social science curricula

There is an important sense in which we do not have a choice; the whole terrain has shifted and bulldozers have already moved in and are busy obliterating the cemetery There are forces abroad, especially in our post-colonial, post-Apartheid, post-modern historical situation, which make it at least extremely difficult to resist the demand to change our curricula Anyone tempted to resist is digging their own grave, or is likely to be seen as dead wood that needs to be cleared to allow the new growth to flourish

We can classify the bulldozers into three broad categories: the market, political pressure and epistemological change The first two have their source outside

of the academy, and the third, at least to some degree, from inside Bulldozers are immensely powerful machines and, in the words of an erstwhile South African president, we seem to be faced with a Hobson’s choice: ‘adapt or die’ If we ignore these forces, we may well find ourselves rotting away in an abandoned cemetery

Vast literatures, familiar to this audience, cluster around debates about these three kinds of forces, and their impact on the academy and its curricula Here

we can very briefly remind ourselves of some of the outlines of these bitter debates