Educational Development in South Africa: From Social Reproduction to Capitalist Expansion?
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Educational Development in South Africa: From Social Reproduction to Capitalist Expansion? Chrissie Boughey Academic Development Centre, Rhodes University, P.O. Box 94, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected]
At an international level, the peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa has often been lauded as miraculous. While political transformation might have been highly successful, changes in other spheres have proved to be much more problematic. This paper examines the change in higher education in South Africa and, more particularly, the role played by the field of Academic or, as it tends to be known elsewhere, Educational Development in that change. In order to do so, it uses Dale’s understanding of mutual contradiction of the state’s need to foster the conditions for capitalist expansion while, at the same time, guaranteeing the conditions for social reproduction as providing a space for policy activity. The role played by the South African Educational Development movement from the early 1980s onwards is then analysed within the context of this policy activity. Higher Education Policy (2007) 20, 5–18. doi:10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300140 Keywords: Educational Development; role; policy analysis
Introduction The field of Academic or, as it is also known, Educational Development is by now a global phenomenon, although the roles allocated to it at institutional and national levels often differ enormously. This paper uses an account of the role of Educational Development within the context of higher educational policy in one country, South Africa, not merely to provide a historical perspective but also to develop an understanding of the phenomenon of Educational Development itself on the assumption that this will be useful in illuminating the roles it plays in other countries. South Africa has the potential to provide a useful case study in this regard not only because of the widely observed slippage in the state’s policy positions from a progressive equity agenda to a more conservative agenda (see, e.g, Kraak, 2001; Oldfield, 2001; Fataar, 2003) in the period 1994 until the present but also because of the dramatic and urgent changes that have taken place in the higher education system since the first democratic elections. In many respects, therefore, events in South Africa have served both to compress and to delineate the roles played by Educational Development because of the radical changes that have taken place.
Chrissie Boughey Educational Development in South Africa
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In order to develop an understanding of the roles played by the field, Educational Development is located within the mutual contradiction of the need, on the part of the state, to foster the conditions for capitalist accumulation and expansion while, at the same time, guaranteeing the conditions for the social reproduction on which capitalism rests. The mutual contradiction between these two dynamics is then understood to provide a space for policy activity on the part of the state (Dale, 1989). Following Fataar (2000),
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