Yesterday he sent me this paper, which will appear in a forthcoming book. It has appeared, in this form, in The Mail and Guardian, the leading South African Newspaper. Tomorrow, I will write an extended commentary relating the things Enver says to the American experience. I urge you to read this important document.
********************
COMMENT
Enver Motala & Salim Vally
Profound conceptual problems arise from the untested assumptions that
pervade much of the thinking and research on the relationship between
education, skills development and employment. Such assumptions pervade public policy,
market-driven and even academic discussions about education, skills development
and job creation, with the result that more fundamental and transformative
approaches are deliberately underrepresented or omitted.
We believe that a number of very important -- perhaps fundamental --
issues arise for examining the relationship between education and training and
the economy.
To begin with, conceptualising the relationship of the economy to
education and training systems should be preceded by some orientation to the
nature of the economy that is being referred to. As we know there were
substantial differences within the
state planning-driven economic systems that characterised the former Soviet
bloc, on the one hand, and the wide varieties of capitalism that have existed
throughout the 20th century, on the other.
There are also differences between post-colonial states themselves,
ranging from states largely based on rural subsistence
and agribusiness to those based on extractive economies or a mixture of such
economies and a manufacturing sector. More recently there are economies based
on a newly developed tertiary and service sector and some characterised by a
high level of militarisation of economic activity.
These economies, in all their forms, exhibit a considerable variety of
political systems ranging between statist and varieties of social democratic,
religio-nationalist and military-oligarchic dictatorships and permutations of
these. It could be argued that if there is any single thread of similarity
between these systems, this would be that all these forms of political economy
and statism are characterised by huge inequalities of social power expressed
through the extraordinary power of statist bureaucracies on the one hand and,
in the case of the varieties capitalist economies, pervasive (even if
different) differentials of wealth, incomes, property ownership and
socio-economic status.
All these societies evince social cleavages and structural differences
that express themselves in the forms of social, class and gender disadvantage
based on racial categorisation, religio-cultural prejudice, caste, geographic
and other forms of social differentiation and discrimination -- whether or not
these are legislatively prescribed. The defining attributes of such societies,
even if they are more pronounced in some societies relative to others
(Scandinavian countries relative to the United States, developed relative to
underdeveloped or peripheral), have been amplified in every case by the
processes of global environmental degradation whose effects have been
profoundly more damaging for the lives of the urban and rural poor of these
societies.
Taking just one of these multiple forms of social and political
systems: What are some of the implications
that are assumed -- yet untested -- about the core assertion that there is
a strong relationship between education and jobs?
a) One implication is that under the forms of
production prevalent in this economic and social system there is a readily
available supply of jobs if the requisite skills are there -- or that,
conversely, once there are skills in the market the jobs will follow. The
further assumption that follows this is that such jobs are there if not
immediately then at least in the short term -- regardless of the conditions for
the reproduction of capital, its composition, the social conditions for its
investment, global financial flows, or even the resistance of labour to the
form of its investment.
Given especially the
composition of capital in market-driven economies it is unclear whether the
increasing mechanisation and robotisation of work results in increases or
decreases in the availability of jobs. What is the presumed relationship
between the new forms of technological innovation and employment? What is the
record of this relationship over time, and what similarly is the role of
capital mobility in the sustainability of jobs in any national employment
system. What evidence is there about this relationship in the global arena
where increases in rates of unemployment are egregious?
b) Another implication is the assumed
relationship between jobs and skills demand that is largely silent about the
qualitative attributes of work: that is, about all those attributes of the
nature of work even in developed economic systems, such as its racialised and
gendered nature, the hierarchies intrinsic to it, the lack of work security in
market-based economic systems, the phenomenon of child labour, the problem of
alienation, and the lack of any serious conception of citizenship and a broader
framework of rights in society.
These attributes and many more characterise
the constitutive social relations affecting work in all societies, making the
assumptions drawn from developed economic systems about job opportunities to
economic and social systems based largely on the primary economic sector or for
subsistence economies untenable.
c) How does one understand the conundrum posed by
the simultaneous complaint that there are no jobs even for graduates while
there are no skills that are appropriate for the economy? Is it simply that
those who do have unused skills are wrongly educated and trained -- too many
humanities and biblical studies degrees and too few science and technology? Or
is this conundrum really an expression of the contradictory and selective
preferences of capitalist labour markets, which can refuse particular skills
while simultaneously complaining about the absence of skills, at once kicking
out some workers while employing others based on the narrower requirements of
the industry and its plants.
Indeed, underlying
every anecdote about failed attempts at securing employment opportunities is
the fear that for every story about an employer who seeks “qualified
employees” there is a compensatory story about employers with impossible hiring
requirements.
d) And in any economic system -- and certainly in
countries such as South Africa – how does the extreme concentration of capital
in a few large multinational corporations affect the possibilities for
employment creation both in the private sector and in a highly dependent
informal economy, and what is the impact of the extreme mobility of investment
capital on the possibilities for job creation in any area of work other than
formal sector employment?
Assuming, however, that the corporate capital
sector is not the main area of concentration of job possibility, and assuming
that in fact it is in the small business, public, informal and care economy,
what then are the necessary conditions that would make these areas of economic
activity actual and meaningful possibilities for work? What in that case would
be the types of useful economic and social activities which can be explored for
the purpose of job creation and social investment – that is, outside of the
formal private sector economy? What
openings are there in such economic systems not only for the much
vaunted SMME's but also for alternatives based on cooperatives, the care
economy and the care of the environment as part of a wider planetary
responsibility and justice,and the green economy?
What realistically are the possibilities for
supporting rural economic activity in the absence of the resolution of the
“land question”. And if these alternative forms of economic activity and work
were to be encouraged, what specifically would be the similarly alternative
forms of education and skills development, alternative institutional forms,
curriculum and all the associated issues that speak to a systemic approach to
reconfiguring the present system quite fundamentally. And how would these be
funded?
All of these, we
assert, are assumptions that remain untested but are critical to any real
understanding of the relationship between societies and their systems of
socialisation through the processes of learning through education and training.
We can conclude from these observations that poorly developed
conceptions of education and training, and their relationship to “the economy”,
remain a key barrier to constructing a meaningful discourse, policies and
practices about the usefulness of education and the potential role that
post-school education might play in society.
Crude formulations of the connectedness of economic activity and
knowledge mar any serious view of how knowledge is produced, what are its
useful characteristics and how it might be assured. Complex questions reduced
to “quick fix”, facile and reductionist approaches to knowledge development and
particular explanations of the national skills strategy are hopelessly
inadequate.
Enver Motala is a researcher at the Nelson
Mandela Institute for Education and rural Development at the University of Fort
Hare and Salim Vally is senior researcher in the University of Johannesburg’s
Centre for Education Rights and Transformation. Both institutions are part of
the Education Policy Consortium. This is an edited extract from Work, Education and Society, edited by Motala
and Vally, forthcoming from Unisa Press
No comments:
Post a Comment