4- Education and Social Differentiation in South Africa

Abstract

Changing class: education and social change in post-apartheid
South Africa
edited by Linda Chisholm
HSRC Press and Zed Books, 2004, 448 pages, R190,
ISBN 0 7969 2052 4 PB (in South Africa ) and ISBN 1 84277 590 1 HC
(in the rest of the world)

The title of this book cleverly conveys its central concern: the changing class composition in contemporary South African classrooms across the spectrum, whether funded by the state or privately.This focus on social class marks a timely return to a crucial concept, generally neglected in post-apartheid scholarship (Alexander 2002; Hendricks 2003). After a decade of democracy in South Africa, there is a need to review the extent to which the plethora of policy enacted by the democratic government has succeeded in changing the extremely unequal socio-economic conditions inherited from apartheid. South Africa’s gini co-efficient of 0.64 in 2003 (Tempest 2004) suggests that we are still far from redressing the deep-seated problems of inequality. Moreover, the racialised inequalities of the education system are also regionally biased, with rural areas remaining the worst off (De Souza 2003). A growing black middle class is widely regarded as one of the successes of democracy in South Africa. However, though the black middle class may have doubled in size (Southall 2004), it remains small numerically and its existence has had little impact on a national unemployment rate of 41, per cent (Tempest 2004). Central to an analysis of educational change is the issue of whether the presence of an enlarged black middle class has affected the quality of education across the system, especially for the majority of children with working class or unemployed parents. The education system plays a central role in producing and reproducing the status quo and my own interest is whether this book provides an analysis of difference as well as an explanation for the persistence of profound social inequality in education.