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 apartheid era 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.

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.

AN IMPORTANT GUEST POST BY ENVER MOTALA

Enver Motala is one of my oldest friends in South Africa.  He has spent a lifetime in the struggle, mostly in worker education in the townships and the unions.  He is an admirable example of the sort of coimmitted union organizer who seems not to exist in the same way anymore in the United States.  Over the years, we have talked for many hours about worker education, the breaking down of the walls between handwork and headwork, the principle of formal educational credentialing for life experience, and the problematic relationship of the labor movement in South Africa to the ANC and to the embrace by Thabo Mbeki of World Bank-style economic rationalization.

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

 

IDLE AND MINDLESS SNARK

It is reported that Karl Rove says he knows a woman with tattoos who will not be voting Democratic.  I am not impressed.  I know an old White man who will not be voting Republican.

MORE MUSICAL MEANDERINGS

My ruminations about viola playing have elicited several long and very interesting comments, by C. Rossi and James Camien McGuiggan.  I turned these over in my mind this morning as I took my daily walk, huddled inside my sweater and hoodie against the 27 degree cold.  What follows is a rather unstructured series of thoughts provoked by those two comments, and by some memories from long ago.

C. Rossi raises a number of questions about the role of the conductor in a musical performance, keyed to a lovely story about Yitzhak Perlman [I accept his emendation of my spelling of Perlman's first name.]  To save space, I am going to assume that you have all taken the time to read the two comments.  He is quite right that we must include trios, quintets, and even sextets with the more familiar quartets as instances of cooperative music making without a conductor.  In a quartet [the genre with which I am most familiar], the first violinist starts them off by raising the violin a bit, or by a nod of the head or some other signal, but thereafter, the four musicians interact with one another constantly rather than following one leader.  The only exceptions to this convention of the first violinist cuing the group are those cases in which one or more of the other players begin a movement and the first violin is silent for a bit.  [For obvious reasons, my favorite example of this is the last movement of the third Rasumowsky -- Beethoven Opus 59, #3 -- a blindingly fast fugue in which the viola !! states the subject -- a rare moment for a violist.]

There are some modern examples of chamber orchestras that play without a conductor, but the modern full scale symphony orchestra is always led by a conductor who stands on a podium, facing the musicians rather than  the audience, and like as not reading from a full orchestra score set on a stand in front of him or her [although even now it is almost always a man.]  I should say that my last personal experience of playing in an orchestra was sixty-three years ago, when I was a student at Forest Hills High School in Queens, New York.  The conductor of the school orchestra was a music teacher named Max Pollock, who was rumored to play jazz in his off hours.  We were not much of an orchestra if the truth be known.  Our signature pieces were Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock" and Borodin's In The Steppes of Central Asia, but Mr. Pollock's principal task was getting us to play the National Anthem sufficiently in tune to allow the students to sing it at school assemblies.  This is the reason why, to this day, I have an imperfect grasp of the words of The Star Spangled Banner.  I never actually got to sing it in high school.

We are all familiar with the theatrical bobbing and weaving and exaggerated arm movements that pass for orchestra conducting these days.  Modern conductors remind me of nothing so much as Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, mimicking the extremely dramatic style of Leopold Stokowski as he conducts an army of brooms carrying pails of water.  All of that modern dance on the podium has virtually nothing to do with the actual music making of the instrumentalists, of course.  Now, I am sympathetic with the conductors.  After all, they never get to actually make music.  The lowliest second violinist in the last chair is contributing more sound than the conductor.

This is not to say that the conductor is superfluous.  Far from it.  It falls to the conductor to choose, and then to elicit, an interpretation of the music, which, as James McGuiggan quite correctly reminds us, is very much more indeed than just playing the notes in time and in tune.  A real big league orchestra conductor will have a deep knowledge of the entire score, right down to the last note of every line, and he or she will make a large number of choices, not only about tempo and dynamics [loud or soft, etc.] but about such things as the balance among the several string sections at each point in the piece and even where exactly the wind players will take their breaths.  The conductor may decide that there is a place in the music where a passage played by the cellists needs to be heard above the violins and violas, or that a phrase played by the oboist should be unbroken by a breath.  Those tiny choices, folded into a professional performance by musicians who can be counted on to play the notes correctly, can dramatically alter the aesthetic quality of the final performance.  It is no small thing to master the score of, say, a Beethoven symphony so completely that you can make those choices and communicate them to the musicians.  There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the legendary conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Arturo Toscanini.  As the orchestra was about to begin working on a new piece, the second oboist raised his hand and said "Excuse, me, Maestro, but I am not certain I can play today.  The B-flat key on my oboe is broken."  Toscanini paused for a moment, looked off into the middle distance, and replied, "It is all right.  You do not have a B-flat."

When I was a boy, my parents were very friendly with Joe and Vera Vieland, who, it was said, had escaped from Russia after the revolution by walking all the way across Asian Russia to Vladivostok and then taking a boat to America.  Joe was a violist with the Philharmonic.  Fifty years later, when I was studying the viola seriously, I was thrilled to find myself working on a number of compositions adapted from the violin or cello literature for the viola that read in small letters over the right-hand end of the first line "arranged by Joseph Vieland."  Toscanini was a tyrant and Joe was a rebel, and apparently he would laboriously work his way up to first desk in the viola section, only to have a fight with the Maestro about something that would land him back at the last desk again.  It was Joe who pointed my parents toward Mrs. Zacharias when I decided as a boy to study the violin.

But all the real work of the conductor of a big league orchestra is completed during rehearsal.  If that work has been productive, and if the conductor's musical vision is compelling, the result will be a truly memorable performance that can rightly be described as an "interpretation," not just as a performance.  The hand waving and bobbing and weaving is for the audience, many of whom probably are as capable of distinguishing a great from a merely competent performance as they are of telling a great Cabernet from two buck chuck.

ONCE AGAIN, A REPLY TO JERRY FRESIA

As so often happens, Jerry Fresia asks questions that cut to the heart of my blog posts and elicits from me responses I would not otherwise have thought to include in my ramblings.  He really asks three or four questions, and I have a different reply to each one.  Here is his complete comment:

"While your story of learning the mechanics, as it were, is fascinating (I'm still trying to fathom how playing notes with a bow differs from striking a keyboard), I'm more curious about what playing the music (once you get to it) does for you as you play it. After all, there is a lot of work going into this, so what's the payoff? Or maybe I should ask this: suppose you were technically perfect, you still wouldn't rival Perlman and Zuckerman, would you? What is the "music"?

Is the language, "to die for," reserved for such things as being moved by music or could you use the same phrase in relationship to, say, reading Kant?"

First things first.  When you strike a key on a piano, inside a little cloth covered hammer hits a string.  Thus, a piano is a percussion instrument.  When you strike a key on a harpsichord, a plectrum [?] plucks a string.  [Hence you cannot play a harpsichord soft or loud -- pianaforte].  When you draw a bow over a string on a violin, or viola, or cello, or double base, friction catches the hairs of the bow on the string and causes it to vibrate, producing a sound amplified by the box and sound post of the instrument. 

It is very hard for me to say exactly what playing the viola does for me.  There are, in me, a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts.  First of all, there is the pleasure on those occasions -- rare or common as may be -- when I make a resonant and beautiful sound.  Making a sound is fundamentally different from merely hearing a sound, although they are related.  When I play an entire phrase in tune and with a good tone, there is a special pleasure [no easy matter on the viola -- pianists have it easy, which is why they play so many notes.  Any idiot can play one note on the piano, and it will sound as good as though it were played by Alfred Brendel.]  Second, there is the pleasure of accomplishment, of working hard and actually getting better.  Then, there is the thought, deep inside but never absent, that my mother and father, sainted be their memories, would be pleased.  Even men approaching eighty feel that somewhere inside.  When I play in a quartet, there is the comradeship of making music with my fellow quartet-mates.  Each quartet experience is different.  In Pelham, MA, I would sit next to the cellist, Barbara Davis, in our quartet, and listen to her beautiful tone as I strove to match my own tone to hers.

There is one thing I am not able to do, simply because I do not play well enough, and that is to craft an interpretation of the music.  That takes a good deal more skill than I possess.  Now, it is of course possible to "master" an instrument and play with a soulless technical excellence.  That is the way I have always imagined Condaleeza Rice playing the piano, at which she is apparently technically quite proficient.  [I may be doing her a profound disservice, in which case I humbly apologize.]  But only in the everyone-gets-a-trophy world of modern private elementary schooling do we pretend that a novice performer is offering an "interpretation."  It is all I can do to play all the correct notes in the right tempo.  I could no more choose to give a Romantic reading of a Bach sonata for unaccompanied cello, arranged for the viola, than I could decide to do a Triple Lutz on the ice.

The last question is one about which I have thought a good deal.  My reference here is the wonderful old movie, The Hustler, starring the young Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felsen with the always great George C. Scott, and Jackie Gleason doing an unforgettable turn as Minnesota Fats.  You will recall the scene in which Fast Eddie and Fats play pool all night.  Newman moves around the table like a great cat, at one point saying, "I can't miss."  Please forgive me for how this sounds, but there have been times in my life, teaching a class on the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason or Das Kapital, when I have felt like that.  The words flow effortlessly, I can see the arguments as though they were suspended in air before me in all their beauty and simplicity, and I know that I cannot miss.  That is a feeling I do know, a feeling I have earned, and those moments are for me the supreme moments of my life.  I can imagine Yo Yo Ma feeling that way as he leans back from the neck of his cello and simply allows the music to flow from his fingers and bow arm as though it had a life of its own.