“A Ticket to Life”: Marketized Schooling, Spatial Pedagogy, and the Politics of Aspiration in Cape Town, South Africa

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

“A Ticket to Life”: Marketized Schooling, Spatial Pedagogy, and the Politics of Aspiration in Cape Town, South Africa

Schooling is a social project of making futures, where youth and families navigate aspirations, framed by perceptions of what’s possible within starkly unequal conditions of possibility. In Cape Town, enduring apartheid geography that continues to normalize racialized inequality is made visible and reproduced in part through schooling patterns and outcomes. Post-apartheid reforms and global trends have accelerated processes of education marketization, including a growing sector of “affordable” private schools that claim to interrupt poverty by producing upwardly mobile subjects from township communities. My dissertation study asked how students, alumni, families, and staff of Launch, a low-fee high school, perceive schooling’s role in facilitating social mobility and societal transformation and tensions between these aims. Based on 21 months of ethnographic research, “A Ticket to Life” draws on Black geographies and critical geographies of education to argue that, in the context of uneven development, aspiration is not simply a temporal striving toward futures, but also a spatial imaginary projecting youth into contested places. It develops the concept of “spatial pedagogy” to describe school practices of challenging the city’s social geography by facilitating youth transgression of locally significant boundaries. While the dissertation explores the school’s attempts to level uneven terrain, it draws on theories of racial capitalism to argue that, rather than flattening inequality, marketization of schooling is enabled by, works through, and reconstitutes racialized geographies. Nevertheless, youth and educators (in school and beyond) harness education as both site and strategy of struggle in seeking the inextricable goals of spatial and racial justice.

Author

• Amelia Simone Herbert, Teachers College, Columbia University