RESPONSE TO A COMMENT

I was just checking the comments, as I do every day, and found a very troubling comment on an old August post by "Theceltiberian" [??] about Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis.  He [she, they] says that they have turned very much to the right in recent years.  Can that be true?  Does anyone know?

A SMALL TRIUMPH

More than six months ago, I met with a bright young UNC Philosophy graduate student who had worked as my research assistant on several book projects.  She was ready to start writing her dissertation, but was rather daunted by the prospect, as many graduate students are when they become "ABD."  I offered her the following deal:  If she would write one page, or perhaps two, of her dissertation every single day, and send me what she had written that day as an email attachment, I would read it immediately and send back comments on the same day [or early the next morning.]  She agreed, went home, and that night wrote page one of the dissertation.  Every single day since then she has sent me a page or two and I have read it, save for a break this Fall when she had to do the elaborate preparation the Philosophy Department requires of those going on the job market.

Yesterday she sent me the last two pages of the final chapter.  She now has a complete draft of the dissertation, just as I promised she would.  There will be revisions, of course, but it is a certainty that she will receive the doctorate.

This is the fourth time I have done this with  a student -- the first  three with Afro-American Studies doctoral students at the University of Massachusetts.  This is her triumph, not mine.  After all, I did not write a word of the dissertation.  But I take a certain pride in the accomplishment none the less.

REFLECTIONS ON ENVER MOTALA'S ESSAY -- PART TWO

Now we come to what I find especially interesting in all of this.  The South African educational system, even after Liberation, offers nothing remotely resembling the structure of "second chances" that are provided to Americans by Community Colleges, Extension Programs, and other ways of accumulating tertiary education credits that can be applied toward a tertiary degree.  In America, a young man or woman who does poorly in high school and has made little or no effort to continue on to college can take college level courses at a local Community College.  If he or she does well, those credits can then be transferred to a nearby campus of the State College system, and those credits in turn can be carried over to a branch of the State university.  All of this is out of the question in South Africa.

But South Africa is full of able, intelligent Black men and women who have learned a great deal of real value on the job or in life, as we like to say.  Let me give just one example.  The largest of the Townships contain hundreds of thousands of residents -- Wikipedia gives the population  of Soweto as more than 850,000.  Under the apartheidregime, the national government did very little in the way of internal management of these huge urban populations, and informal, unacknowledged, unofficial governments sprang up that provided internal policing and other city functions.  The Black men and women who performed these functions did not have university degrees in Political Science, but they knew how to run a big city.  So those engaged in educating and training township residents or union members, like Enver, seized on the existing educational theories of alternative education and formal credentialing of practical knowledge, arguing that so long as the society demanded educational credentials for the best jobs, the non-white men and women who had over many years acquired demonstrable skills should receive credentialed recognition of that fact.

At the same time, Enver and others began to elaborate on the old argument about the destructive consequences of the separation of "head work" from "hand work."  We are all familiar with that distinction.  In the United States, it is sometimes described as the distinction between White Collar jobs and Blue Collar jobs, or between "suits" and "shirts," or between working class and middle class.  There is a long tradition in European and American radical educational circles of challenging the legitimacy of that distinction as not intellectually or educationally grounded, and as serving primarily to enforce and rigidify social and economic class divisions.

When I first arrived in South Africa in 1986, before Liberation, I was enchanted to discover that in that politically enslaved country these ideas were alive and well, while in supposedly liberated America, they were all but dead.  This was one of the reasons that I fell in love with South Africa and committed my time and energy to the struggle for liberation both there and here in America.  This is a long and very sad story, but the short of it is that after Liberation, few if any significant changes were made in the South African tertiary educational sector.  There was a years-long hullaballoo about "transformation," but aside from some mergers and reshufflings at the administrative level, the hide-bound old-fashioned rigid educational system continued.  The only difference was in the shades of color of the faces of the students.

My experiences in South Africa forced me to reexamine my assumptions about American higher education.  As my one book length discussion of the subject [The Ideal of the University, 1969] makes clear, the early part of my long career was spent in the elite, privileged private sector of American higher education.  I taught at Harvard, at Chicago, at Columbia.  When I moved to the University of Massachusetts in 1971, I thought of myself as going into the belly of the beast, but of course UMass is itself part of the elite sector of higher ed.  Wikipedia says that there are 2774 four year degree granting educational institutions in America.  UMass is surely among the top three or four hundred, and perhaps among the top two hundred.  So in leaving Columbia for UMass, I was, so to speak, going from a gated community to an upper-middle class suburb.

But that of course does not begin to capture the reality of American society.  Only slightly more than thirty percent of Americans over the age of 25 have earned the B.A. or its equivalent.  It is important to pause for a moment to reflect on the significance of that statistic.  Seventy per cent of the adults in this country are simply ineligible for almost every decent job because they lack the appropriate educational credentials.

To be sure, you need a college degree to be a professor, a doctor, or a lawyer.  Indeed, you need several.  But you also need a college degree to be a high school teacher, to be an elementary school teacher, to get into a corporate management training program, to work for a business consulting firm, to be an architect, a Registered Nurse, an FBI agent, to have any hope of working for a non-profit.  If the Walmart website is to be believed, your chances of becoming a Walmart store manager without a college degree are minimal.  So seventy percent of Americans can kiss all of those jobs goodbye.   

Since virtually everyone who talks or writes about education and the American economy is in that thirty percent -- and most are in the very much tinier segment of graduates of top colleges and universities [counting UMass and its equivalents as part of the "top"], the talk is all about how hard it is to get into the elite handful of Ivy League schools and their equivalents, as though that were the only question worth discussing.  Save when the conversation turns to African-Americans and Latinos, no one really acknowledges that most Americans do not have college degrees.  Now, to be sure, a larger share of each age cohort gets some post-secondary education.  After all, those 2774 four-year schools manage, on average, to graduate within six years only about 55% of the students who enroll.  But the fact remains that even now, not having a college degree is the norm.  By the way, when I was an undergraduate, only about six or seven percent of Americans had a college degree!

REFLECTIONS ON ENVER MOTALA'S ESSAY --- PART ONE

There is so much to say about Enver Motala's essay that I am somewhat at a loss to know where to begin.  I have, over the years, written a great deal about education both here in the United States and in South Africa.  I shall draw on some of that body of material in this discussion, which, now that I am started, strikes me as likely to last more than a single day.  From time to time I shall even incorporate passages from those writings into this extended essay.  I suppose I think of myself as being somewhat like the composers of the baroque or classical period who did not hesitate to borrow from themselves.

Let me start by telling you a bit about the context within which Enver has spent his life working.  South Africa in the apartheidera had an extremely rigid and traditional educational system at every level from elementary to higher education.  As you can imagine, the schools were rigidly segregated, not simply into white and non-white systems, but into White, African, Indian, and Coloured systems mirroring the geographic and residential segregation of the nation.  The Indian people are the descendants of workers brought from India to labor in the sugar fields of Natal Province on the eastern side of the country.  The Coloured people, who speak Afrikaans, not English, as their native language, are the mixed race descendants of Dutch settlers and Malay and African residents of the Western Cape section of the country.  When the Boer government implemented the theory and practice of apartheid, or "separateness." the non-white peoples were forced to relocate in areas designated for them, with the African majority population being forcibly separated into ten or more groupings according to their native languages.  The white population depended on the labor of non-whites, but at the same time did not permit them to live within the cities where their labor was required.  Thus grew up the institution of racially segregated townships just outside the White cities where African, Indian, or Coloured families could stay when their work day was done.  [The so-called influx control laws and pass laws forbade non-whites from saying in the cities after sundown, so early each morning hundreds of thousands of Black men and women would begin the long trip by train or bus into the cities to work and then retrace their steps each evening.]  The best known township is the African township Soweto [ = SOuth WEst TOwnship].

 

The educational systems were organized along the same racial lines, with elementary and secondary schools for Whites only, Africans only, Indians only, and Coloureds only.  Although the official ruling ideology originally denied that non-Whites were capable of higher education, eventually the economy developed to the point at which there was a need for non-White workers trained even beyond secondary schooling, and so in addition to the Afrikaans-language and English language universities that were established by Whites and which flourished, a series of universities came into existence specifically to educate non-Whites.  The oldest such university, Fort Hare, is the alma mater of Nelson Mandela and many other South African and Southern African political leaders.  The University of Durban-Westville was established to educate Indian students, the University of the Western Cape was founded to educate Coloured students, and several universities in addition to Fort Hare were founded to educate African students, among them the University of Zululand, Transkei University, and the University of the North.

The education in the universities was a mixture of British and Continental traditions, in both cases extremely hidebound, with year-long courses graded with a single end of year examination, and virtually no possibility of partial credit for the work done during the year.  There was also no way to transfer credits from one institution to another, not even, say, from The University of the Witwatersrand to Cape Town University, the two leading English language universities in the country.  All of the good jobs were reserved for whites, of course, and typically required university degrees.  Virtually the only fellowship support came from the mining companies, which offered bursaries to undergraduates who were willing to commit to working for the companies after they earned their degrees.

Even to be eligible to apply for admission to a university -- any university -- required a performance of a certain level and nature on the school leaving exams called by everyone "matrics".   All of the universities are state funded, and if one of them chose to admit a student who had not "earned a matric" the university would not receive state support for that student in the funding formula used to calculate how much each university received each year.  Each racial group took a separate set of matric exams, and the exams administered for the small group of African students who actually took them were often graded in a haphazard and irrational fashion.  Roughly two percent of each African age cohort "earned a matric."  This does not mean that two percent of each year's Black eighteen year olds went to university.  It means that only two percent were even eligible to go to university.  When Jakes Gerwel, the first Coulored Rector of the University of the Western Cape, declared a policy of "open admissions," he did not mean -- he was forbidden by law from meaning -- that every young Coloured or African or Indian man and woman who completed high school would be admitted on a first-come first-served basis [which is roughly what "open admissions" at City College in New York meant during its open admissions policy.]  Gerwel meant that he would accept any student who managed to earn a matric.  Some years later, using a loophole in the law, UWC experimented with admitting several hundred non-matric students under a State policy of allowing a University Faculty Senate some discretion in admissions.  These so-called "Senate Discretionary" students, for whom of course the university received no state subsidy, were then followed at UWC to see how their performance compared to that of students who had earned a matric.  I was not at all surprised to learn that there was no discernible difference in the academic performance of the two groups.  For several years, my scholarship organization gave money to UWC specifically for bursaries for those non-matric students in an effort to encourage the experiment.

How does this relate to what Enver Motala has spent much of his life doing?  [You may be able to tell, by the way, that having spent twenty-five years of my life deeply involved with South African education, I could go on for many, many pages discussing this or that aspect of the system, but I will spare you.]  Well, while all of this was going on in the universities of South Africa, millions of African, coloured, and Indian men and women were leading their lives effectively excluded from formal higher education, and provided with woefully inadequate primary and secondary education as well.  Enver and many other committed activists have devoted their lives to offering worker education to union members [mine workers, factory workers, and so forth], to township residents, and to the rural population forced to live in the so-called Homelands.

WASTING TIME

Very tricky NY TIMES crossword puzzle today.  I had filled in more than half of it before I finally caught on to the gimmick.  After that, it was not hard to finish.

Good news.  I have found a violinist with whom to play Mozart's great duet, K423.  We shall see how it goes.

John and Ansel tweet about TFIOS movie

"The fox studio lot. Great meetings today about #tfiosmovie! Big things coming soon..."

"Been hearing amazing things about #tfiosmovie. Really amazing things. Just got off the phone w @joshboonemovies"

CLARIFICATION

A reader of this blog wrote to me, disturbed to have found a story online about the corruption and evil doing of Enver Motala.  There are two Enver Motalas in South Africa, my friend, and a notorious crook.  I should have disambiguated them.  Sorry about that.