Educational outcomes in South Africa are highly unequal and reflect inequalities across socio-economic classes and racial groups. This essay will explore education-related causes of the reproduction of inequality across generations. Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’ can help to understand how structural inequalities reproduce themselves through education. The causes can be explained from either side of the learner-teacher dichotomy. Approaching the question from the side of the learner, one can draw upon an understanding of Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus along with structural determinants of outcomes such as family background, neighbourhood, race and socio-economic status. According to Bourdieu, class structure is characterised by inequality due to differing amounts of economic, cultural and social capital that members of a society hold. The amount of capital one holds is a determinant of how one will fare in life, educational outcomes included. Learner outcomes can also be understood in terms of individual ‘agency’. Approaching the question from the side of the teacher, we find that inequality can be caused via culturally insensitive teaching methods, differences in human capital depending on salary and area, management of schools, school resources and the curriculum.
The first part of this essay discusses the relevance of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to the situation in South Africa. Cultural capital (tastes, knowledge of how social systems work, manner of speech, general awareness of culture and educational attainment) affects the receptiveness that a learner has towards the style of thinking required of education. It is heavily influenced by family background and the neighbourhood one lives in, but socioeconomic status also plays a role. The parents of poor learners who wish that their child excel academically do not have enough knowledge of how the education system works to be able to promote their child’s self-determination. For example, in a cross-sectional ethnographic study by Moore (2013) of poor mothers living in Cape Town, it was found that educational attainment decreased with age. Thus, the level of the mothers’ knowledge of how to succeed in school is lower than the level of knowledge that their child needs to possess. The 1995 October Household Survey shows a positive correlation between the mother’s highest grade attainment and the number of years of schooling that their child has completed, controlling for age (Anderson, Case & Lam, 2001: 47). This shows that family background affects a child’s receptiveness to education (a phenomenon in which Bourdieu’s theory is applicable). A focus on the mother as opposed to the father is relevant given the amount of time that women spend on childcare, and given the high proportion of women who enrol in educational institutions (De Lannoy, 2009: 87).
Let us consider how economic capital affects educational outcomes. That is, the financial resources and assets that one is able to draw upon in order to achieve goals. A learner who can draw on economic capital can utilize it to gain a higher level of education. Thus, economic capital gets transformed into cultural capital, which preserves class hierarchy over time. Better quality education is represented by better resourced schools, better quality of teaching and better management of schools. Van der Berg, et al. (2011: 8) state that the detrimental impact of poverty on educational outcomes is well-documented. After analysing the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality survey of 2007 (SACMEQ III), Van der Berg, et al. (ibid.: 8) concluded that poverty seems to have an even more detrimental effect on educational outcomes in South Africa when compared to other countries in Africa. The reasons they gave for this was not only centred around the burden of poverty, but also around the burden of a history of inequality during apartheid, which has resulted in poorly resourced historically black schools. Differences in educational outcomes still correlate strongly with the historic colour of the school, and race is still a determinant of education quality, drop-out rate, distance to school and future wage rate (Anderson, Case & Lam, 2001: 40-41; De Lannoy & Lake, 2009: 83-84; Van der Berg, et al., 2011: 7-10). Although Bourdieu’s concept of economic capital can explain why poverty and under-resourced schools disadvantage learners, his perspective (of class structure) has the limitation of not considering the effects of race in post-apartheid South Africa. Apartheid has also resulted in certain locations, those which were historically a non-white area, providing poor opportunities when compared to other locations. The broader effect of neighbourhood type and school type cannot be explained solely in terms of capital.
The second part of this essay looks at inadequacies within the South African education system. Although schools in South Africa are better resourced than neighbouring countries, outcomes are only marginally higher, and the standard of a pass remains low up until grade 11 (Van der Berg, et al., 2011: 4-9). 80% of the education budget is spent on personnel. However, it is difficult for the government to redistribute education inequality through personnel expenditure because better qualified and more experienced teachers prefer to teach in more affluent schools (ibid.: 3). Thus, the constraints on the quality of human capital in poor schools appears to be a chronic problem and the government has adopted a policy of focusing more its non-personnel expenditure on poor schools. Having said that, only certain types of resources are appropriate for a poor school. For example, data projectors require IT skills on the part of the teacher and would only be realistic in a classroom that has security measures put in place. A more necessary resource for poor schools appears to be textbooks (ibid: 13).
One of the ways which the education department has strived to address inequalities is through a reform of the curriculum. The reform aimed to address racial and occupational prejudices present in apartheid curricula. However, there are concerns that the new outcomes based education (OBE) curriculum is not cross-cultural enough (Jansen, 1998: 328) and is widely believed to have been an impediment to progress (Van der Berg, et al., 2011: 3). One could argue that learners who do not have the necessary cultural capital to understand the curriculum are at a disadvantage. OBE policy aims to encourage co-operative learning by putting the teacher in a more facilitative role as opposed to the traditional lecturing role, but the practicality of reforming teaching methods through policy has been criticised (Jansen, 1998: 325-326).
The issue of teaching methods is important. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus helps us to understand how teaching methods can be biased towards more affluent learners. Habitus is the automatic bodily responses that give the observer an understanding of the person’s background and affects the way teachers and potential employers perceive you which, in turn, affects their behaviour towards you. In the field of education, learners who are not intellectually stimulated at home will display a habitus in the classroom which will indicate their discomfort, which can lead to those learners being neglected and alienated in the classroom. Pager (1996) as cited in De Lannoy (2007: 11-12) talks about a “culture of learning in Khayelitsha secondary schools” which is anti-academic and reflects the low motivation and laziness of students, resulting in “chaos, lack of discipline and demoralisation … in many township schools”. Responses in interviews that De Lannoy and Pager conducted indicated that these attitudes are the results of family background. On the other hand, affluent learners have been socialized that they deserve to understand the work and be treated individually, and will impose their requests more strongly on teachers than poor learners. For these reasons, it is important to develop teaching practices that are responsive to the different mental states and behavioural dispositions that learners bring to school (Nash, 1990: 436).
To summarize, Bourdieu’s theory of the transmission of class can be applied to education in South Africa. This essay has highlighted the effect of cultural capital carried in family background, of economic capital held by an individual or school and of habitus carried by learners. On the other hand, Bourdieu’s theory is too focused on the transmission of socio-economic inequality and ignores racial inequality. Race is still a determinant of the quality of education received, not only because of its overlap with class, but also because of its overlap with neighbourhood type and resources available in a school. Thus, because of the legacy of apartheid, capital is transmitted within racial boundaries as well.
[1 383 words]
September 2014
References
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De Lannoy, A. & Lake, L. 2009. Children’s access to education. In South African Child Gauge 2008/2009. Pendlebury S., Lake, L. & Smith, C. (Eds) Cape Town: Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town.
Jansen, J.D. 1998. Curriculum reform in South Africa: a critical analysis of outcomes-based education. Cambridge Journal of Education. 28(3): 321-331. DOI: 10.1080/0305764980280305
Moore, E. 2013. Transmission and change in motherhood: black mothers in three-generational Cape Town families. Journal of Southern African Studies. 39(1): 151-170. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2013.764713 [2013, May 28]
Nash, R. 1990. Bourdieu on education and social and cultural reproduction. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 11(4): 431-447. Available: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1392877 [2008, September 16]
Van der Berg, S., Burger, C., Burger, R., de Vos, M., du Rand, G., Gustafsson, M., Moses, E., Shepherd, D., et al. 2011. Low quality education as a poverty trap. (Research report). Stellenbosch, South Africa: Social Policy Research Group, Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University.
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