How education theory could be used to help shape genuine democracy

Philip Machanick, Rhodes University
Come 1994, many South Africans assumed that the official end of apartheid meant “job done – we are a democracy.” But despite an excellent constitution and world-class public institutions, the country looks increasingly dysfunctional.

So if a great constitution and carefully designed public institutions don’t make a democracy, what was left out? I believe that, crucially, civil society was not retooled for freedom. Two concepts drawn from education research may hold a possible solution to this shortcoming: first, the idea that knowledge is socially constructed and, second, the notion that self-efficacy is a significant factor in ability.

Issues of agency

In an authoritarian state, there are a limited number of levers of power. Control of those levers is centralised. Ordinary citizens cannot easily fix societal wrongs, nor safely organise themselves into groups that aren’t sanctioned by the state.

In a democracy, though, ordinary citizens should have access to lesser levers that work to their personal or, in small groups, collective benefit. The workings of government are open to ordinary citizens. They can attend public meetings and access government policies and documents. This is particularly valuable at a local government level, where officials who control the processes that affect ordinary people’s lives are close to hand and should – in theory – be easy to reach.

But such levers are not familiar to most citizens in a country like South Africa, which has a strong culture of protest. This culture does not recognise that there are other levers of power besides those held by leaders in high places. At my own university, I’ve asked protesting students how the institution’s management could do better. Their response? “Don’t ask me. We have highly paid leaders who should be solving these problems.”

This suggests that change can only be achieved by supplication. Whether this is polite but possibly ineffectual or expressed with extreme anger, such supplication starts from the same place: the view that an individual or small groups of individuals lack agency. One of the biggest drawbacks of this approach is its short-term nature. An example from my own small town: in 2014, 3,000 residents signed a petition calling on the owners (government rail monopoly Transnet) to save the historic railway station from being dismantled by looters. The municipality and the provincial heritage authority had failed to act on earlier complaints.

That is an instance of supplication – asking or trying to order the authorities to fix things. The property was fenced off, security guards installed and the worst of the damage was repaired. But it was just a quick fix: residents were not empowered in any way. They have been excluded from planning the future use of the station site. They do not have the leverage to demand such inclusion unless they start another petition campaign.

This illustrates how problem solving has stalled in South Africa. The government is trying to take on too much and failing. Many transitional societies run into the same problem: there is too much to do and government becomes bogged down. With a more activist civil society, the weight of doing everything can be lifted from government so it can focus on bigger problems.

But how can these alternatives be introduced to South Africans?

Can we learn from education?

The idea that knowledge is socially constructed deviates from the earlier view of education theory that was more cognitive. In the social construction view, knowledge is not just about what you know, but also about how you interact with others and what you are.

What is missing in South Africa is the knowledge of what it means to be a citizen of a free, democratic society. That is not just about knowing that one is a citizen, but knowing how one should behave and interact with others. A social discourse is part of that knowing: when we enter a situation where we are unhappy with how others perform, how do we interact with them? How do you react when someone criticises the way you perform? These are not trivial questions in a multicultural country.

Self-efficacy is the perception that individuals are able to control events that influence their lives. In education, that sort of belief leads to better educational outcomes. It confers a kind of self-belief that you will be able to solve a hard problem.

This idea fits well with what Black Consciousness leader and activist Steve Biko called psychological liberation, which calls on oppressed people to liberate themselves from the externally imposed idea that they’re incapable and so should be looking for external salvation.

These ideas apply equally well in understanding how to reconfigure a failing society.

What is ‘normal’?

In a dysfunctional society, the norm becomes doing what is actually antisocial. In a place like South Africa that has never been “normal” in the sense of a free, open society where individuals have agency, there is no norm on which to build. Antisocial behaviours become the new normal when the shackles are loosed. There are some who believe that a return to an authoritarian society is the answer. It’s not.

Instead I propose drawing on those two ideas from education theory to build a functioning civil society in which the “normal” involves behaving in a socially aware manner, rather than doing what you like.

Many levers for democracy

I am not dismissing protest as a tool, but merely arguing that it is not the only tool. Stopping at protest implies that a society is not really democratic because treating supplication to the powerful as the only option for change implies that power relations cannot shift.

Ultimately a society can only work if the levers of power are effectively wielded. In an authoritarian system, that means the levers are centralised and tightly held. In a democracy, they are distributed and loosely held. For a genuine free democracy to work, citizens need to learn what it means to live free. A large part of that involves grasping the levers of power at their disposal.

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Philip Machanick, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Rhodes University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Great Right Wing Attack on Feminism

Right wing sites and their followers on social media love bashing feminism. The usual tactic is to highlight some extreme action or statement as if it is all feminism is about. Sometimes this is made up or something more reasonable is taken out of context – but any movement has adherents who take things to an extreme. If you take those extreme events – whether imaginary, exaggerated or real – as representing an entire movement then it says more about you than it says about feminism.

What has feminism achieved? Here’s a short list of what it was like to live in a pre-feminist world:

• women could not vote
• women were paid a significantly lower wage for the same work and often did not have the same benefits (such as employer-sponsored retirement fund)
• women could lose their job just for getting married
• control over reproduction was considered wrong; a woman was supposed to make babies whether she wanted to or not
• victims of rape were considered at least partly responsible
• if women could get maternity leave at all, there was no matching paternity leave, meaning that they took the sole career cost of having a family
• women were not considered suited to management jobs
• women could not aspire to any professions out of the limited pool of teaching and nursing
• women were not expected to take credit for scientific discovery even if they played a pivotal role (Marie Curie shattered that barrier by winning two Nobels in different sciences)

You could argue that some of this could have been achieved without feminism. But if you look for the opposite kind of society that has not only failed to develop feminism but retains a dogmatic pre-modern patriarchal outlook, very few of the above have occurred.

Try Saudi Arabia, for example, where women are not allowed to drive and are not even allowed out of the house if they may encounter unknown adult males without a male relative chaperone (a mahram:a young child will do). In practice, this is not strictly enforced in situations like shopping but a Saudi woman may not be examined by a male doctor, for example, with a mahram companion. I asked a Muslim work colleague about this and he explained that the Quran requires that a women have male company in a situation of danger – as a practical guideline because men are on average stronger – and the ludicrous implication of the Saudi law is that their society is unsafe in ordinary day-to-day situations.

Afghanistan, despite the overthrow of the Taliban, remains a deeply misogynistic society, as do the tribal regions of Pakistan, with horrendous practices like “honour” murders.

Even more so: regions under control of ISIS.

Generally speaking biggest the enemy of feminism is literalist, patriarchal interpretation of religion.

And that also is found in Western society in the form of movements like the Tea Party (which fortunately is constrained by a robust constitution that they clearly would like to tear up).

So do we still need feminism – aren’t the achievements I listed enough? As long as we still have patriarchal and misogynist attitudes in society we need a movement to counter that. As one example, the mentality that a rape victim “asked for it” or at very least ought to be ashamed still persists. Why, if that is not the case, is a rape victim entitled to anonymity?

If you get drunk and fall asleep without closing your front door and wake up to find your house emptied by thieves, does society expect you to be so ashamed that your identity should be concealed? Even if you did something stupid that left you vulnerable, no one has to take advantage of that. In fact you could argue that a crime taking advantage of vulnerability is worse than taking on someone able to defend themselves.

So: yes, feminism is still relevant and there is still work to be done. And no: I do not support ludicrous interpretations of feminism, even if those interpretations are real and not the product of the fevered imagination of rabid right wingers.

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Update: Some right wingers may argue that feminisms past achievements are good but – job done – we can stop the whole movement now. However the right side of politics bitterly opposed all these advances at the time and it is unreasonable to suppose that they would not attempt to backslide if the pressure let up.

The Survivor Fallacy

Survivor Bias

Survivor bias is a particular kind of logical fallacy – if you only recount the experience of the survivor, you leave out the victim. It is part of a wider sort of fallacy that I call survivor fallacy – basing your theory of the world on only looking at evidence of survival.

In a certain sense, there is value in only looking at who survived because that represents a kind of Darwinism – those who survived, you would think, are the best role models. But this is fallacious reasoning. You also have to look at those who did not survive to see if the survivors are a lucky minority out of those who did something bad for survival. What you really need to look at is whether those who survived beat the odds – are they over-represented compared with similar individuals who didn’t survive?

Some numbers. If you do something that has a 1 in a thousand chance of survival and you are part of a subgroup of humanity who have a 1 in a hundred chance of survival, you are onto something.  Without this missing piece of analysis, you have nothing.

Here’s an example. I heard a news report of someone who was sitting in a car at a red light, unable to move, when he saw a huge truck hurtling towards him. He prayed mightily and somehow survived the complete and utter wreck of his car without a scratch. This, he claimed, was a miracle. The problem is, if you have a one in thousand chance of surviving such an event, you have to assume – if it is not just that you got lucky – that the other 999 unlucky sods did not pray just as fervently as you did. Of course, since they died, there is no way to ask them. But in a society with a high level of religious belief (up to 90% in tribal societies like the United States), you have to assume that a similarly high level of those who were crushed were at least as religious as the survivor.

So did prayer work? Not likely. If 90% of the population is religious and only one in a thousand survives this sort of crash, being religious doesn’t really help your odds. Unless you can show that more than 90% of the survivors were also religious.

Another car crash variant: the person who survived a horror smash because he didn’t put on his seat belt. The other 999 out of a thousand who die in this scenario don’t get to tell the tale.

Likewise people who drink like a fish and smoke like a fish (smoked fish is tasty) and live to be 90 are not typical – and you tend not to run into people who did likewise and died before they reached 50 because they didn’t live long enough to meet a lot of new people.

Anthropic principle

Another variant on the same kind of bias is the anthropic principle. Let’s say for argument’s sake (since we don’t actually know) that it is extremely, wildly improbable that intelligent life develops on a planet. After all it took some 4-billion years on this one, and we have not discovered any incontrovertible evidence of alien intelligent life. So does that mean life on this planet had to be have been created by a deity? No. Even if it is stupendously unlikely for the conditions for not only life but intelligence to develop, if it happens in one place, the creatures so developed (us, for example) would be around to ask this sort of question. That is the essence of the anthropic principle: if the universe was not set up to support life (for whatever reason – even for no reason) and it did not develop as it did here, we would not be here to wonder how it all happened.

You can’t make this stuff up – or can you?

Here’s a fun story that illustrates survivor bias.

Imagine a pre-industrial civilization that develops the false myth that pigs have an instinct to swim towards land, so all ships carry a pig. If the ship is slowly sinking or supplies are running short, the pig is tossed overboard, and the ship sets sail whichever direction the pig chooses to swim. Every now and then a ship is lost at sea and is never seen or heard from again. Every now and then a ship arrives safe and sound after the pig toss. After much merriment and celebration (the pig’s role is unstated at this point), the pig myth is considered confirmed.

What of the ships that are lost? Who knows … no one can report back if they tossed a pig overboard and everyone died.

Curiously, I made up this story a while back to illustrate the survivor fallacy and don’t recall telling it widely, but if you search on “pig swims towards land myth” you find some people quoting just such a myth. You just can’t make this stuff up. Or, rather: I did but it’s hard to be original where superstition is concerned.

The Missing Middle

I present some thoughts on why political opposition to the ANC is failing to make much of an impact on the ANC’s support base.

You need to take care not to lump all ANC supporters together.

The rural poor have had genuine advances: running water, RDP houses, fuller schools. That the water supply is unreliable, the RDP houses fall apart and most of the schools are little better than day-care centres reduces the value of these gains a lot, but they are gains. Add in social grants and food parcels, and the ANC makes a pretence at caring about this section of the community and no one did before, so they get away with it.

The group more likely to switch are the emerging middle class who are finding that they earn more than the NSFAS cut-off yet can’t afford university fees, so their prospects for improving their next generation are frustrated, and frustrated hope is a huge driver of change. This also is a group that is more likely to read forums like this, and to feel they are not at home with the people they find here. Would they vote EFF? Maybe, maybe not. Agang should have been attractive to this group, but failed for a bunch of reasons I won’t bore you with.

If you step back and look at the big picture, new political movements arise from new alignments of class interests. Old movements decay into patronage networks. Old movements’ survival game is thwarting any realignment of class interests. The ANC has that covered with workers because unions have been absorbed into the patronage system. This works because the unions have a deep hierarchy and a small number of leaders near the top can be bought off relatively cheaply (cabinet posts, provincial government etc. – Shilowa was a good example, while that lasted). The emerging middle class is harder to buy off because it does not have a hierarchical structure. Hence the government’s fearful response to #FeesMustFall.

Race is the government’s key weapon to stop a realignment of middle class interests into a powerful political movement. They failed to split the EToll protest movement this way, but they did manage to split #ZumaMustFall to a large extent because of racist responses by supporters of this campaign.

Any opposition movement to be successful must tap into this growing demographic and firmly condemn racism not only in its ranks but also in its wider support base.

So why not the DA? The DA has the same neoliberal economic agenda as the ANC and has a general arrogance about it that makes it a difficult choice for voters who have not already bought into it. Its history also makes it unattractive.

Neoliberalism is the agenda of the rich: in every country that has bought into it, the result has been increasing inequality.

Though the DP grew out of long-time anti-apartheid predecessors, its 1999 “Fight Back” campaign under Tony Leon was designed to attract pro-apartheid voters (“fight back” against what?). Then when the DA was formed by merging with the “New” National Party, the suspicion was deepened that this was a party of closet apartheid apologists. When the NNP split off and merged with the ANC, somehow this was not seen as negative for the ANC.

Because of this baggage, the DA has trouble cutting through. For this reason, I still see a case for a new movement. If anyone is interested let me know and I can start you off with what went wrong with Agang…