We will not be hewers of wood: Protest and contestation in the formation of the South African vocational education system 1970-2020

• In Event: Markets and Education

Proposal

The 1976 student uprising in Soweto, South Africa, is generally understood to have been triggered by the imposition of the Afrikaans language as a medium of instruction. Less well known is that the students were also protesting an education system designed to prepare people for particular occupations. "We shall reject the whole system of Bantu Education whose aim is to reduce us, mentally and physically, into 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'" declared the manifesto of the Soweto Students Representative Council (1976).The subsequent years saw significant periods of protest and attempts to reform the education system’s relationship to the labour market. The vocational education system that emerged under the democratic government after 1994 is a product of the contestations and protests by students and workers in the final years of apartheid, through to the present. This paper explores the findings of a historical sociological study of the evolution of South Africa’s skills system and how protest shaped the discourse, but institutional processes led to outcomes often at odds with the intentions of the protestors.

Skills development and vocational education systems lie at the confluence of a unique set of contesting social forces and institutional logics - capital, organised labour, the state, national and international education systems and discourses, social values, and social structures such as race, class and gender, all intersect and shape the way societies organise the preparation of citizens for work. How the system takes shape and what institutions emerge over time provides a unique insight into social change and social formation, particularly when a society is undergoing processes of radical and rapid reform. How do particular systems emerge, and why are some institutions more resilient and/or resistant to change? What are the roles of economic and political forces relative to the role of belief systems or individuals in these processes of institutional reform? These are the questions this paper addresses through a case study of vocational education reform in South Africa during the final decades of Apartheid-colonialism and the first decades of emergent democracy.

Between 1970 and the present day South Africa has been subject to intense contestation politically, socially and in terms of regulations. From the race based social engineering of Apartheid which linked particular occupations and skills to race and gender, through the social justice imperatives of the anti-Apartheid project and attempts at building social solidarity and cohesion, and on to the contemporary attempts to navigate a globalised neo-liberal individualised economic project, these five decades represent a period of radical, on-going systemic change. However, education and training institutions have remained surprisingly resilient and resistant to change, ensuring continuity across many features of society and undermining (actively or inadvertently) many attempts at redressing historical inequalities and social injustice.

The paper will provide a historical-sociological account of a part of South
Africa’s history that has not been widely documented thus far (exceptions include McGrath 1996; Gamble 2022), but will also provide broader insights into processes of social contestation and change shaping the vocational education and skills formation system. This is particularly salient at a time when technical and vocational education is viewed internationally and nationally as key to addressing a range of social and economic challenges in developing and developed societies (viz. UN’s SDG 4, the UK’s skills system reform, and South Africa’s National Development Plan Chapter 9). Many accounts of education change in South Africa (and in other societies where there have been major social changes) have focused on the rupture between the pre- and post-Apartheid periods, and dealt with continuities in terms of the unwanted legacies of the past. This paper will move beyond that account to develop a layered chronology where change at one level may not be witnessed at another level or in a different part of the system at the same time.

The ontological starting point is located within the critical realist tradition, which seeks to examine the mechanisms that are at work underneath the observable social world.
The methodological framework is derived by bringing together two bodies of theory.
The first is Neo-institutionalist perspectives, specifically the three pillar approach of
WR Scott (1994, 2005, 2008). He argues that institutions (understood as durable social structures comprising activities and resources that provide meaning and stability to societies) are constituted through a) regulative, b) normative and c) cultural-cognitive processes. Institutions are not to be reduced to organisations. They may have organisational form, may be a part of an organisation, or may be an abstract concept such as an apprenticeship. In order to understand institutional change or continuity it is necessary to focus on the legal, regulatory and administrative level, but also how those rules relate to concepts or values held by the people that act in the institution, and how the institution is embedded in cultural understandings (and individual mental frames).
The second conceptual lens focuses on the policy processes, where I draw on Robertson and Dale's (2015) Critical Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) framework. This locates educational reforms within a broader context of political, economic, and cultural processes - locally, nationally and globally.

The conceptual framework will be utilised to analyse data from a selection of vertical case studies (Bartlett and Vavrus 2014) of particular episodes of protest, reform and institutional change. The project drew on documentary analysis of policy documents, historical accounts of protest, and 31 interviews with key actors in the policy processes and in the organisations contesting the terrain.

Author

• Volker Wedekind, University of Nottingham