Class struggles
The challenges of achieving schooling for all

The challenges of achieving Education for All (EFA) remain beyond the grasp of many countries, particularly the poorest. Inequalities continue to mar access to education. However, progress has been made over the last decade. In April 2000 the Dakar World Education Forum adopted six goals aimed at improving and extending EFA (see panel).

UNESCO’s EFA Global Monitoring Report of 2002-03 shows that countries accounting for about 70% of the world’s population have either achieved some basic measure of EFA (based on primary net enrolment, levels of adult literacy and gender parity in primary school gross enrolment) or have made progress towards the Dakar goals. Significant challenges remain, however, for the rest of the world’s population, located primarily in sub-Saharan Africa but also some countries of South Asia.

Getting the formal education system right is a crucial sub-goal of the Dakar agenda. Giving the goal of education ‘for all’ meaning and substance remains a challenge, although the scale of the challenge differs for individual countries. Getting children into school is just one step in a long process towards ensuring attendance and completion of a full eight year elementary education cycle. Failures to secure retention and low levels of achievement in low quality schooling environments continue to render claims of improved access insufficient as evidence of meaningful progress in education. As the title of this issue suggests, struggles to make the classroom a space where social differences and inequalities at least cease to matter and at best are consciously addressed, now must move towards the centre stage of the education policy debate.

The focus on access is important in reminding us that for many of the world’s disadvantaged children, schooling remains physically and financially out of reach. There is growing evidence, however, that there is a very high demand for quality education, as parents and children realise the importance of basic education as a means of functioning and surviving in a shrinking and globalising world. What are schools and educational systems doing to respond to this demand? Do discussions around ‘access’ adequately address the fact that it may be policies and practices within schools themselves which undermine progress towards EFA?

Several of the articles in this issue provide examples of the ways in which children get pushed out of schooling. Porteus reports on research in South Africa, which showed the range of factors that prevent some children from keeping average pace with basic schooling. These include an inability to afford the material costs of schooling; vulnerability to ‘shocks’ such as health crises, violence and death of family members; impacts of residential instability, particularly in terms of high residential mobility; learning problems faced by individual children - either in terms of their interest or their ability; and wider impacts of social violence within the community and resulting political instability. Income-based definitions of poverty are insufficient to capture the range of other disadvantages that compound material inequalities to produce vicious cycles of ‘marginality’. Issues facing marginalised learners cut across the family, encompassing the community, wider society and the policies of the state. Out-of-school and over-age learners also identified school-based barriers in terms of uniforms and school fee policies, language policies that only reflect ‘dominant’ cultures and social groups and the lack of space in schools, amongst others, as preventing them from progressing.

As social institutions, schools are therefore vulnerable to instability within the environment in which they function. They also face diverse student learning needs, abilities and home environments, and internalised views on the part of teachers, learners and parents, about social inequalities and differences. Learners also bring social ‘baggage’ with them into the school. In Jamaica, as Sewell argues, processes of gender identity that are built into the socialisation process at home and in wider society, have led to a culture of under-achievement for boys. Girls are socialised to be more domesticated and docile, while boys are encouraged to play and have more independence. This ironically has led to a reversal in relation to performance within the schools. Girls work harder and perform better, while boys are seen to be ill-disciplined and unmotivated. These attitudes, which lead to boys and girls being treated differently, are reproduced, rather than challenged, by teachers in the classroom.

Schools themselves are not immune from these wider social structures of inequality. They do not operate as neutral actors in an environment which they can easily change, but reflect the dominant cultures in which they operate. Soudien writes about the ways in which inequalities of race and class are reproduced within school management structures in post-apartheid South Africa, where black parents’ voices often continue to be drowned out by prevailing hierarchies of authority and knowledge within the school. These hierarchies of authority are based on generations of knowledge accumulation being concentrated in the hands of ethnic and class elites, with the result that newer generations of school populations are deemed to lack the knowledge to manage educational processes.

The way in which these hierarchies of knowledge play out within the school is also captured by Sarangapani’s ethnographic research in a village school in India, where the teaching process proceeds with the implicit objective of erasing the knowledge learners bring to the classroom and imposing the teachers’ ‘authoritative knowledge’ on the learning process. Sarangapani observes that children’s ‘talk’ in classrooms is crucial, particularly for rural children and children from underprivileged backgrounds, as the worlds they inhabit and their realities are under-represented in official curricula. The teacher therefore plays an important role in mediating the official world of the textbook and the ‘real worlds’ of learners.

Moving forward: focusing on ‘inclusive’ schooling

These challenges amid progress indicate that more rather than less effort is needed. Many initiatives are being undertaken that show that schools and educational systems are keen participants in processes of change. Soudien’s report on the School Governing Bodies in South Africa demonstrates that in contexts of entrenched inequality, school governance matters. Viewing schools as part of wider social and political processes is a first step towards recognising the vital role they can contribute towards overturning social inequalities. Sewell’s case study of the ‘Change from Within’ initiative in Jamaica also demonstrates that school-based solutions built on the active participation of teachers and learners can be the best way forward to changing dominant cultures within schools. In this initiative, participating schools located themselves where the home and the community meet, but also recognised the importance of focusing on individual needs of learners within the school.

However, to increase the attention paid to these issues, national and international policy debates and processes themselves must shift in orientation to move beyond a preoccupation with access. As Sayed notes, South African education policy is making the shift towards ‘inclusive education’ as a way of mainstreaming concerns about injustice and inequality into education systems. This builds on and expands the achievements of struggles for disabled peoples’ rights to education. Mainstreaming ‘inclusion’ requires treating ‘differently-abled’ learners and those with more challenges to face than others, not as ‘problems’ to be dealt with in parallel, but as citizens towards whose needs and rights the education process needs to be oriented. Importantly, ‘inclusive’ education recognises inequalities of power between different social groups as also a political problem for which more active policy solutions must be found.

Policy mandates need not only to be expanded but also underpinned by greater transparency and accountability. As Porteus argues for South Africa, despite greater debate over policy, actual policy approaches are much more narrowly conceived in terms of economic efficiency and cost-cutting, which view learners who perform poorly as ‘inefficient’. The language of ‘wastage’ to discuss repeaters in practice continues to place the onus on the learner to overcome deficiencies within the schooling system. Reversing this tendency to blame the learner, her home and the wider society in which she lives and moving more constructively to viewing how schools can lead the way to enable parents, teachers and learners to work together to overcome education exclusion is necessary. These are not just ‘micro-level’ issues, but require appropriate policy language and frameworks to enable a more broad-based approach to addressing the EFA challenge.

Tomasevski speaks to this broader policy mandate, arguing for a shift towards ‘rights-based’ education as a way of ensuring that states do respond to these challenges speedily and effectively. The role of legislation as underpinning national government commitments to international law is emphasised as a means of ensuring that different actors meet their financial commitments to ensuring meaningful ‘education for all’ m

Ramya Subrahmanian
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

T: +44 (0)1273 606261
F: +44 (0)1273 621202

r.subrahmanian@ids.ac.uk

See also: ‘Education inclusion and exclusion: Indian and South African perspectives’, IDS Bulletin, Vol 34, No.1, January 2003, edited by Ramya Subrahmanian, Yusuf Sayed, Sarada Balagopalan and Crain Soudien

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Copyright remains with the original authors but (unless stated otherwise) articles may be copied or quoted without restriction, provided id21 and originating author(s) and institution(s) are acknowledged. Copyright © 2005 id21. All rights reserved.