Missed opportunities: The rhetoric and reality of social justice in education and the elision of social class and community in South Africa Policy

This article will examine the paradox of post-apartheid education policies which established the formal basis for social justice and equity through legislation while in reality these laudable goals remain unattainable and elusive.The article will be informed by and build on the conceptualisation and analysis of the barriers to social justice and equality in education by global and local critical, postcolonial and political economy of education scholars. It will critically outline the key arguments and studies around these concepts and will show the strengths and limitations of their analyses.Conceptual coherence will be achieved through a theoretical framework which focuses on social class, community and critical education policy. An original contribution will be made by extending and adapting some of these views, beyond their initial application, to support the education initiatives of South African social movements in poor communities. In concert with the latter, local education policy analyses will be critiqued for not paying sufficient attention to issues of social class, context and community voices in education.https://doi.org/10.19108/KOERS.83.1.233

Violence, resilience and solidarity : the right to education for child migrants in South Africa

This article examines the psychology of migrant learners’ resilience, their right to education, and how migrant organizations and South African civil society are supporting and reinforcing the agency of migrant learners and their parents. It is based on a year-long study conducted by researchers at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT), funded by the Foundation for Human Rights. Testimonies, participatory workshops, surveys, interviews, and focus groups with learners, parents, educators, officials, and civil society activists in three South African provinces were studied––Gauteng, Limpopo, and the Western Cape––spanning rural, urban, and township areas. The article is framed by the traumatic experiences of migrant learners before entering South Africa, during their stay, and often when they are deported. Topics covered in the testimonies include children’s rights to, and in education, they also traverse gender issues, the travails of unaccompanied minors, and obstacles preventing migrants’ participation in schooling and society

Missed opportunities : the rhetoric and reality of social justice in education

Abstract: This article examines the paradox of post-apartheid education policies which established the formal basis for social justice and equity through legislation while in reality these laudable goals remain unattainable and elusive. The article is informed by and builds on the conceptualisation and analysis of the barriers to social justice and equality in education by global and local critical, post-colonial and political economy of education scholars. It critically outlines the key arguments and studies around these concepts and attempts to show the strengths and limitations of their analyses..

Worker education in South Africa: Lessons and contradictions

Worker education played a crucial role in the development of the trade union movement in South Africa and in the broader struggle for social transformation. This article reviews key moments and dynamics in the trajectory of worker education in South Africa. We argue that international developments, the rise of neoliberalism, and the negotiated compromise between the African National Congress (ANC) and the apartheid state, as well as corporatism resulted in changes to worker education. While the latter as it existed in the past has weakened, the centre of gravity has shifted to community organizations where various forms of learning and creativity continue. Despite the challenges and setbacks of recent years, there remains a significant legacy and influence of the traditions of worker education and militant trade unionism in South Africa, which can and should be drawn upon

Education, Covid-19 and care : social inequality and social relations of value in the South Africa and the United States

Abstract:Education has not been spared during the Covid-19 pandemic that has exposed deep inequalities across the world along lines of ‘race’, class, gender and geography, as well as the digital divide. However, many of the policy responses and solutions proffered to mitigate the crisis fail to address the generative structures that made public education institutions so vulnerable to shocks in the first place. Using the work of Nancy Fraser and Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya, 2017), we argue that understanding the prevailing capitalist social institutional order, and the relations it generates between spheres of production and spheres of reproduction (including education), is fundamental to theories of change that not only respond to the Covid-19 moment justly, but also avoid reproducing and deepening the conditions that made Covid so cataclysmic to begin with. By analysing the conditions of public education across South Africa and the United States comparatively, a case is built for distinguishing between affirmative responses that leave inequitable structures intact and transformative responses that seek to address the root causes of injustice and violence amplified by the pandemic

Modeling missing cases and transmission links in networks of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Patterns of transmission of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) remain poorly understood, despite over half a million incident cases worldwide in 2017. Modeling TB transmission networks can provide insight into drivers of transmission, but incomplete sampling of TB cases can pose challenges for inference from individual epidemiologic and molecular data. We assessed the effect of missing cases on a transmission network inferred from Mycobacterium tuberculosis sequencing data on extensively drug-resistant TB cases in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, diagnosed in 2011–2014. We tested scenarios in which cases were missing at random, missing differentially by clinical characteristics, or missing differentially by transmission (i.e., cases with many links were under- or oversampled). Under the assumption that cases were missing randomly, the mean number of transmissions per case in the complete network needed to be larger than 20, far higher than expected, to reproduce the observed network. Instead, the most likely scenario involved undersampling of high-transmitting cases, and models provided evidence for super-spreading. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis to have assessed support for different mechanisms of missingness in a TB transmission study, but our results are subject to the distributional assumptions of the network models we used. Transmission studies should consider the potential biases introduced by incomplete sampling and identify host, pathogen, or environmental factors driving super-spreading.This work was presented at the Seventh International Conference on Infectious Disease Dynamics (Epidemics7), Charleston, South Carolina, December 3–6, 2019.The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, US National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Emory Center for AIDS Research, the Einstein Center for AIDS Research and the Einstein/Montefiore Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.https://academic.oup.com/ajehj2021Medical Microbiolog

Worker education in South Africa 1973-1993.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education.With the rise of the independent trade union movement since 1973, immense importance has been attached to worker education. The growth of the union movement created the space and provided the resources for workers to assert an independent cultural practice in which worker education plays pivotal role. Intense debate has raged within the union movement over the content, of this education, the way it is to be provided, who the recipients should be and whether it fulfils its perceived aim. There exists general consensus though that worker education has been integral to the development of the labour movement. Yet, there is no comprehensive study of worker education in South Africa. Such a study is even more necessary today as attempts are made to address the historical deficiencies in the South African education system, This report therefore is a small contribution toward understanding worker education and the importance of its role not only for the Labour: movement but for society at large. (Abbreviation abstract)Andrew Chakane 201

The curriculum and citizenship education in the context of inequality: Seeking a praxis of hope

In South Africa, more than most countries, the meaning of citizenship and related rights has faced severe contestation centred on categories such as race, class and nation. Close to two decades after the first democratic elections, notions of citizenship in South Africa represent a complex dynamic involving a combination of one or another of these social constructs, as they relate at different times to changing social, political and economic imperatives. In this article we explain that analyses of citizenship education in South Africa have traversed different phases over the last two decades and discuss some of the research on how ideas and values around citizenship are translated into classroom practice. We then examine notions about citizenship and social justice in the shadow of the xenophobic or Afrophobic attacks of 2008/2009 and in the light of the present rise in racial tensions within and across communities in South Africa. Our conclusion highlights the paradox that, despite the normative framework of the Constitution, policies and the curriculum, structural inequalities in society will continue to thwart attempts at social cohesion