Schooling for Reparative Futures by Moving Beyond Aspiration

• In Event: Reparative Education: The Politics and Practice of Repair

Abstract

As states forgo redistributive policy and embrace marketized social services, the commodification of education as a ticket to social mobility has intensified across global contexts (Verger, Fontdevila, Zancajo 2016). Scholars have critically examined how this intensification has generated a focus in formal schooling on pedagogies of aspiration that emphasize individual enterprise and self-improvement as the most appropriate path to futures beyond precarity (Desai 2020; Lukose 2018; Mathew and Lukose 2020). In South Africa, apartheid-era pedagogies of domination restricted black aspiration to create a laboring class, but the celebrated “doors of learning” have now opened to a competitive, racialized marketplace of schools (Hunter 2019; Nkomo 1990; Vally 2019). A growing sector of “affordable” private schools claims to level uneven terrain and interrupt apartheid legacies of inequality by fostering aspiring, upwardly mobile youth from township communities (Languille 2016). While these schools often frame their efforts in justice terms and adopt progressive pedagogies like trauma-informed and student-centered practice, their emphasis on individual aspiration as engine of social change aids neoliberal governance by fostering “aspiration nations” of hard-working, burdened youth with individualist imaginings of the future and obscured consciousness of structural sources of inequality (Pimlott-Wilson 2017).

In this paper I draw on 21 months of ethnographic research at a low-fee township high school in Cape Town to argue that liberal individualist notions of aspiration compromise the reparative potential of progressive pedagogies by neglecting to conscientize youth of the historical and ongoing political construction of inequality. I contrast the school’s use of pedagogies of aspiration to propel individual students toward “fulfilling futures” with youth activism spaces that use popular education pedagogies to foster critical consciousness and collective action toward alternative shared futures. I explore what school-based educators can learn from activist and popular education contexts and propose that “reparative futures of education” (Sriprakash 2022) require pedagogies that reach beyond inculcating individual aspiration to activate what I call a capacity to conspire.

Theoretically, I draw on scholarship in anthropology, education, and black studies to interrogate how discourses and pedagogies of aspiration rehash meritocratic notions of individual responsibility and deflect from structural analyses of racial capitalism. While the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2013) is often portrayed in neutral terms as a sort of virtuous striving that should be cultivated in schools, aspiration is a complex and contested political practice shaped by past deprivations and present precarities (Mathew 2018). Christina Sharpe (2016) details how the labor of aspiring is both “violent and life-saving” particularly for black youth navigating constricting atmospheres left in the wake of enslavement, colonialisms, apartheid, structural adjustments, forced migrations, and more. Methodologically, I draw on data from participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with students, alumni, teachers, and activists. I build on student accounts of their contrasting experience in schools and activist spaces and on pedagogical reflections of educators in schools and activist settings. Overall, I propose reorienting schooling beyond solely fostering individual aspiration and toward also activating a capacity to conspire, or act together, for reparative futures.

Author

• Amelia Simone Herbert, Barnard College