Safety in the arms of Violence: Education in the age of digitisation and private incursion in public provision South Africa

• In Event: The Visibility and Invisibility of State Governance: A Critical Analysis of Educational Policy and Development Educational Initiatives (Panel 1 of 2)

Proposal

Across the world private or non-state provision has arguably been viewed as important alternatives to what is referred to as ‘poor’ public services and state provision in a variety of national contexts. Conversely, in South Africa the provision of state public services to learners and the communities from whence they came after 1994, was regarded as the main vehicle for social change. The visibility of the state in providing these edu-care and other social services after 1994 was critical to the commitment and transformation of the institutional systems that had existed during the apartheid era.

The main thrust of the paper is to firstly briefly show how public education provision thinking intersected with other social services and welfare provisions in South Africa post-1994 to offer the majority of the learner population hope and safety from the apartheid past. However, the bigger focus is on how key restrictions and contradictions in relation to social change in the neoliberal 21st century constrained key developments, inflicted enormous harm, and shifted policy goals in key ways that restricted hard-earned access to public services. The paper shows how this occurs through increasing private incursions into public state provisions, with the state progressively rendered invisible whilst remaining the most visible service provider for public provisioning (servicing 90% of the learner and vulnerable children populations). This shifting configuration of public service and the moving of boundaries of accessibility have created completely different modes of institutional governance in South Africa.

By mapping out some of the contours of the unfolding socio-educational-care systems in South Africa, focusing on a case study that addresses the needs of vulnerable youth in a prison-like settings with different virtues of education and care, the paper analyses the implications of these shifts for the everyday experiences of marginalized youth desperate for public provision, services, and visibility. It also analyses the increased role of digital and other packaged remedial services offered as a way of better serving their needs. The aim is to pose questions about what is minimally acceptable and ethical in the education and care of marginalized youth in terms of human solidarity in ever-worsening social and ecological moments, and discuss the different kinds of losses that the poor, the marginalized, and the ‘disposed’ face in the onslaught of the private and the policy commitment thereto.

The value of the discussion is to unpack the changing landscape of public-private provision in South Africa and to locate them in institutional terms (with key examples provided of public educational and care spaces) to environments where education and care provision in South Africa is increasingly being packaged, digitized, and performance-framed alongside the commodification and economization of overall state and non-state provision. A new language of safety and racial capitalism has emerged in South Africa in the 21st century that has served as a direct attack on public education, reinforced new forms of inequalities, and is changing the ways in which new educational alternatives in the new period are sought.

Author

• Azeem Badroodien, University of Cape Town