An answer to inequality and waste of human potential

South Africa has a history of massively damaging and racist social engineering, the effects of which are clearly evident in our grossly unequal shambles of an education system.  Evidence was again provided last week in the latest international Grade 4 reading for meaning rankings.  But the fact that the effects remain so pronounced, nearly 30 years after the transition from apartheid, is the primary responsibility of a government that has so far paid little more than lip service to its commitment to generations of young children.
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Education is the real key to a better life for all:  a confident, literate and critically questioning generation would refuse to accept oppression and exploitation.  That was a fact realised by the ideologues of apartheid, itself the culmination of centuries of racist oppression and exploitation.  So they sought to cripple intellectually, the black majority of South Africa’s population at a time when small breakthroughs in education remained evident.

It was also a time before automation and computerised instruction had become widespread and when the largely agricultural and mining economy in South Africa relied on masses of relatively unskilled, low-paid labour, the Biblically ordained “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.  These two factors also most certainly lay behind the warning issued in 1946 by JG Strijdom, then leader of the pro-apartheid National Party, in the then Transvaal to DF Malan, who became the first apartheid prime minister in 1948.  It is on record that he told Malan that it would be impossible to maintain racial discrimination if the level of black education was steadily improved.  In other words, education of “subordinates” would sow the seeds of destruction of any oppressive (in this case racial) regime.

At the same time, on the margins of what was a racially skewed parliamentary democracy, there were moves toward equal education and equal opportunities, mostly promoted by missionary groups and a few radical individuals.  In 1939, for example, the Nursery School Association of South Africa (NSASA) was founded.  Its constitution stated:  “The association is organised in the interests of the preschool children of South Africa, irrespective of race or class or politics or creed…”.  

As late as 1947, the association’s secretary noted in a newsletter:  “I hope that the time is not very far distant when every child will pass through a Nursery School complying with all the requirements set out in the following pages.”  These requirements related to high standards of early childhood care and education and of the comprehensive teacher training that had first been established in 1936 in Sophiatown.  In fact, the first graduates of a this three-year nursery school training course were black women.  Similar courses, alongside “practice”nursery schools “for whites” were established in Johannesburg and Cape Town in 1937 and 1939 and a second college came into operation in Orlando East.

However, the writing was already on the wall, and was clearly spelled out in February 1948 in a Manifesto on Education produced by the Institute for Christian National Education (CNE) and distributed by the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Unions.  It stated (in translation):

“The parents must not shuffle onto others the duty of bringing up their own children;  but we realise that the poor in the cities are forced to send their children to Nursery Schools.  These should have a religious centre, Christian -Nationalist spirit and personnel, appointments  made and vigilance kept by a controlling body chosen by the parents and state support.”

This manifesto was aimed at parents classified white and reflected the CNE view that any nursery school (or child care outside the home) was a perhaps necessary evil;  that, where unavoidable, the desired values of ethnic nationalism and Calvinist Christianity should be paramount.  Such organisations did not even consider education, let alone any early childhood care for the majority of children.

When the NP and its allies took parliamentary power in 1948, they moved swiftly.  By 1950, the Group Areas Act consolidated several earlier segregationist measures and ordered that urban areas should be divided into racially segregated zones.  Several other, related, measures followed before the introduction in 1953 of the Bantu Education Act.  It has been justly described as “one of the worst and most shameful moments in the country’s history”, in that it aimed at crippling not only early learning, but also all education for the black majority.

The purpose of the Act was spelled out unambiguously by the then minster of native affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, when he introduced the Bill to parliament:  “If the native in South Africa today, in any kind of school in existence, is being taught to expect that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake.”  All “black schools” had to follow the new syllabus that stressed subjects such as needlework for girls and basic agriculture for boys.  It was education, as the Britannica encyclopedia notes, “aimed at training the children for the manual labour and menial jobs that the government deemed suitable for those of their race”

After 1958, forced mass removals, with the aid of bulldozers and heavily armed police, saw the cultural kaleidoscope of Sophiatown transformed into a “whites only” suburb named Triomf (Triumph).  The Thabong nursery teacher training college was also closed down, its last 15 students graduating in the year Sophiatown died.

However, economic reality gave birth to an emergent and militant trade union movement and massive, grassroots resistance that finally resulted, along with international pressure, in a negotiated settlement that held out the promise of at least a revival of the hopes that had existed on the margins before 1948, especially regarding education.  But while the aftermath of the 1994 election promised much, especially on the education front, it has delivered very little of real substance.

So while the latest shocking, but hardly unexpected reading ranks caused a flurry of discussion about the need for remedial action at schools, too little was focussed on the major source of the problem:  the absence of good, universally available early childhood care and education.  American educationalist, John Dewey, once noted that he had “never been able to feel much optimism regarding the possibilities of higher education when it is built upon warped and weak foundations,”  

He was right.  If you build a house of whatever design or size and misuse the materials available while ignoring the need for sound foundations, the structure is likely to be unstable and even dangerous.  In many cases, if remedial action becomes necessary, it is usually time consuming and expensive — and seldom quite as good as it might have been.  Similar logic applies to the growing of plants — of crops to feed ourselves.  Inadequately planted, in unsuitable soil and not well nourished, we cannot expect good, let alone the best, results.

This argument is accepted at governmental level, but little is ever done about it.  The focus, when it comes to policies about improving the lot of the next generation, is almost exclusively on formal schooling — and usually on the upper grades, on college and university.  In South Africa, Grade 12 “matric” results have become something of a fetish.  This is much like worrying about the fragility of the 12th storey of a building while largely ignoring the fact that the foundation is unstable or even rotten.  At the same time, no-one will deny that anything built on weak or warped foundations is likely to have problems or even to collapse.

Yet the evidence of how good foundations should be laid is there in decades of surveys and careful analysis.  Governments, including our own, accept the facts, at least in theory, and are signatories (and have ratified) the Convention of the Rights of the Child.  The South Africa  Bill of Rights also states  that “A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child.”  

The best possible early childhood care and education is clearly in the best interests of every child.  This alone could turn  the tide against what is the ongoing growth of inequality and the accompanying and horrendous waste of human potential.

•  Terry and Barbara Bell are working on a book on the history and importance of early childhood care and education