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 apartheid
regime, 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!
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