COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT IN BASIC
EDUCATION: DYNAMICS OF PROVISION AND REGULATION IN SOCIAL POLICIES UNDER
ZAMBIA‘S SECOND REPUBLIC
By
Katele Kalumba, 1991
___________________________________________________________________________
INTRODUCTION
This paper
addresses some but not all questions related to the theme of community
involvement in basic education in Zambia.
Specifically, it addresses itself to two key issues that dictate the
form and content of community involvement in social policy spheres such as
education and health. These issues
pertain to the modes of education provision and the structure of regulation.
That
communities have been called upon to participate in the production of social
services is an empirical reality in Zambia. It is known that 30% of all rural
health centres were constructed on self-help basis (MoH, 1982). But before
analysing why communities should be involved in education it must be asked why
the question arises now. This question
raises issues about whether there is coincidence between the aspirations of
educational bureaucrats and their key partners and the empirical perception of
communities on what is the problem with current forms of education provision.
WHAT
ISSUES MAKE THE QUESTION OF COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT IN BASIC EDUCATION NECESSARY?
Over the
years, allocations of public finance have always been supplemented by community
self-help schemes in the construction of the physical infrastructure of schools
at the primary level. But as the empirical
chances of progressing to higher levels of education recede, self - help
efforts have dissipated. This point was
highlighted by the community-based study of child survival in Mansa and Samfya
districts in Luapula (Kalumba, 1990) which suggests the problematic nature of
conceiving of community involvement in social service provision in financing terms alone.
According
to officials in Mansa, many schools in rural areas are under- utilised because
parents do not encourage school attendance.
Ministry authorities in the province reported that lack of textbooks,
science equipment and chemicals, and sanitary conditions were the major
problems in most schools. Most buildings
were dilapidated and inaccessible by authorities because of bad roads. The
example cited by the provincial education authorities was the road to Mabo.
The extent
of dilapidation and resource deficiencies of some schools can be illustrated by
Mabumba Basic School. Although nominally
a secondary school, Mabumba Basic is an educational nightmare. Books are in short supply. Some books were donated by a foreign agency
but they are incompatible with the educational curriculum. The living conditions of student in the
‘dormitories’ are nothing short of an educational and public health
scandal. The so -called dormitories are
old, temporary and, by now, cracking asbestos structure left behind by a
Chinese road construction team. The
negative health effects of asbestos have been ignored by both health and
education authorities.
Asbestosis
is a pneumoconosis due to inhalation of asbestos dust. Pulmonary fibrosis results in man from
inhalation of chrysotile, the serpentine type asbestos. The clinical symptoms are due to fibrosis and
the concomitant pathological change, chiefly emphysema and bronchiectasis. Progressive dyspnea, which can lead to
disablement, is the chief symptom. Cough
and loss of weight also occur.
Complications of secondary respiratory infections may even cause
death. No known treatment for asbestosis
exists; elimination of exposure to asbestos is the only effective method of
reducing the mortality from asbestos-induced conditions.
The
condition which makes Mabumba Basic School particularly worrisome is the
multiple usage of what are disintegrating structures which release asbestos
dust. School authorities report a high
incidence of coughs or chest complaints among students who use the facilities.
Aside from
the health risks posed by the structures, inspection of water sources for the
dormitories revealed unhygienic wells covered by thick green algea. Both boys and girls wash in contaminated
waters which are very likely to contain Bulinus africanus and Biomphalaria
pfeifferi snails. These have been
implicated in urinary and intestinal schistosomiasis respectively. Cercarial and miracidial contamination of
water is very likely under the conditions observed at water points serving the
school.
The
problems of sanitation and the supply of drinking water to schools are general
ones. The provincial education
authorities reported that 50 percent of schools have less than an adequate
supply of drinking water. Further, while
schools may report that a latrine exists, there are great “variations in the
care for them” This fact stresses the role of school health services.
School
health development committees exist only in schools which have a child-to-
child
health programme. However, the content
of such education-based health activities is shallow and does not even provide
guidelines for the prevention of prevalent endemic diseases like cholera. According to provincial education
authorities, topics such as sex education, sexually transmitted diseases,
vitamin A deficiencies, drugs and alcohol are not covered.
There are
provisions for adult education . Mansa Continuing Education and Samfya Skills
Training Schools provide educational opportunities particularly for Grade 7
school leavers. Carpentry skills are
taught in these institutions. In general
these facilities are poorly serviced.
At the
local level in Mabumba and Mabo, the schools are faced with very serious
problems. In Mabumba, Mongo School
reported difficulty in attracting children to attend school. This problem is most evident among girls, 80
percent of whom drop out by Grade 4. The condition of Ninge Primary School in
Mabo typifies the decay of rural schools.
The state of this school cannot be fully grasped by an account such as
this.
There is
simply no incentive for schooling or for teaching. Teachers appear disillusioned by the many
problems they face in their work, to say nothing of their welfare
problems. Ninge provided the most
comprehensive assessment of a school’s needs and conditions in our review and
is here used as a representative case for rural schools in Mansa and Samfya
district.
In this
school the teacher-student ratio of 1:50 was well above the national average
. Out of a total of 25 boys and 9 girls enrolled in 1987, 12
boys and 3 girls passed their qualifying Grade 7 examination but their
certificates had not come out yet.
The school
had 5 classrooms, one by two government constructed school block and one by three
-classroom self-help constructed block.
The three staff houses had leaking roofs and in each over 75 percent of
the window panes were broken. Pupil and
staff toilets were “nearly falling” Both the government and self-help
constructed classrooms had no door panels and no glass panes in any of the
windows. There were no door frames in
the self-help classes. None of the
classrooms has locks.
With
respect to new staff houses, one had been built and left at window level. It needed door frames, window frames and
glass panes . Two more staff houses were needed besides new staff toilets. Other building needs identified included a
practical building consisting of one room for home economics, one room for
woodwork, and two rooms for stroage of practical materials (home economics and
woodwork).
The school
faced critical problems of text books supply, and there were serious transport
difficulties in chasing after these books at district level. Some books such as social studies handbooks
for upper classes are not printed. According to the school officials at Ninge the
number (of exercise books) supplied |by| the district to schools does not equal
the number of children, i.e. only a few are given, and the senior classes are
given first priority “(Ninge School Assessment Report, 1989).
There were
no supplementary readers for grade 4, 5, 6, and 7 . The school lacked visual aids for
teaching. The few that had remained in
stock were in very poor condition. Upper
primary and lower primary and lower primary social studies charts and maps were
unavailable. There was no globe or map
for social studies. The school had no
radio or cassette recorder, an old one which had been taken for repair by the
District never having been returned.
There were
20 usable seater-desks thorughout the school.
Teachers estimated a need for 100 more.
Only three teachers’ chairs were in stock; ten more were needed. The school needed nine tables but had only
two. Similary only two out of the seven
cupboards required were available. Sports
equipment, such as footballs and netballs, were non existent.
The school
reported that etere as no clean water supply because the pump at the
well was
out of use and anyhow the water was contaminated and the well often dried up
dring the dry season.
COST
DEMAND ARGUMENTS FOR COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
From a
resource-based premise it is easy to advance two interrelated arguments which
explain why such decay makes the question of community involvment necessary at
this point in Zambia. The first related
to the difficulties of providing “free” educational services. The second is the increasing pattern of
demand fuelled by demographic factors.
The
cost-demand argument assumes certain conditions in reconciling the conflict
between public budgets and social demands for equity in education. The policy implications are, first, that a
society can allocate educational services more equitably by increasing the
amount of services, or reducing the popullationdemanding such services, or
diluting the level of education. Second,
a society can distribute costs of education more evenly be reducing the size of
the ediucation budget, or increasing the population who should contribut to
cost -recovery in order to spread the costs widely, ot raising the cost to a
level that the members of society are willing to accept (Nagel, 1996). Communities participating in the provision of
basic education would be aprt of such a cost-sharing equation.
The
demographic argument follows the economic argument closely. Zambia’s economic deterioration is exacerbated
by a rapid population grpowth rate of 3.2 percent per annum, with the
population more that doubling from 3.5 million in 1963 to over 8 million in
1991. This has resulted in a high
dependency ratio, with 110 dependents per 100 productive working -age adults. It is estimated that the under-five
population for 1990 was 1.6 million.
Effectively, this places a large strain on soocial services such as
education and reveals the gap between real demand and the level and
distribution of educational provision.
The
economic argument, and its limits as a justification for community involvement,
are illustrated in some evidence provided by Kelly (1991b). Limiting his discusssion to the formal school
system administered by the central government ministry of education, Kelly
examines the financing of primary, secondary and university education. The major part of the investigation analyses
the source and disposition of funds over the seventeen- year period from 1970
to 1986 from which the principal problems of educational financing in Zambia
are identified. Further, an assessment
is made of the official policies taken or contemplated in response to the
difficulties delineated and the prospects for the future financing of education
in Zambia are evaluated. Kelly’s work,
then, consists of a review of the role, problems and policies of central
government in the financing of the Zambian state school system.
Kelly finds
that the Zambian school system was funded inadequately by the central
government in the period reviewed. He
shows that school enrollments doubled while official expenditures on education
decreased and argues that the problems of Zambian educational financing are
both economic and demographic. The
economic aspect is that about the same proportion of resources was devoted to
education out of total government expenditures whose value (in Constant prices)
delined over time. The demographic
context is that a rapid of population
growth led
to increasing numbers of school-aged children.
In this situation, Kelly asserts, the two sources from which the
government sought additional funds for eduction were inter-governmental
assistance from abroad and the private sector at home. These sources, in his view, contributed less
than was needed for the adequate funding of the school system . He advocated that fresh intiatives be taken
to reform educational practice:
Adeclinig
economy and ann expanding population are on widely diverging tracks. The gaps cannot be spanned by tapping
additional sources within the public, semi-state, private or foreign
sectors. What is needed is something
that Zambia has not yet thought out, a new method of making educational
provision that will make a much smaller demand on resources than the traditional
hierarchic institutional modality that few have bared to question (ibid, p.
50).
It may be
observed that Kelly’s paper suggests that suggests that the key to the Zambian
central government’s management of educational financing is structure reforms
of the the school system. He argues that
for as long as the structure of the school system remains unchanged, the
problems of education financing will be insoluble.
In
Practical terms, Kelly’s implied preference in resolving the budget/demand
crisis seems to be the proposal to shift the burden of cost to users at the
post-secondary, particularly univesity.
This position conforms with the argument of the World Bank for user
-fees to be charged for health and education.
Kelly correctly says the users of post-secondary education are generally
persons of higher socio-economic status and that, on this account, they ought
to pay for the educational services they have received freely so far.
What
Kelly’s assessment raises is the question: to what extent are these categories
of persons able to claim benefits from public provisions based on their
capacity to block the administrative implementation of programmes which they do
not favour. In another work, Kelly
(1989, p.34) has recognised the “diverse manipulations that middle - and upper-class
parents use, consciously or unconsciously, to secure places for their
dependents”. In other words, he concedes
that indeed these groups do have the capacity to obstruct policy, our
understanding of the limits of policy proposal for financing is seriously
jeopardised. The question therefore
comes back to the role of social power in the provision and regulation of
education.
MODES OF
PROVISION AND REGULATION AS DETERMINANTS OF COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
These are
at least two key issues that dictate the form and content of community
involvement in social policy spheres such as education. These questions pertain to the modes of
educational provision and the structure of regulation.
As with
health systems, education systems in most Third World countries have been
modelled on the experience of the industrialised countries with heavy
concentration of formal schooling infrastructure, mostly limited to the urban
pouplation. Formal education, mainly
publicly provided in these environments, basically suffers from the gap between
its content and the life experience of those who pass through it, between the
systems of value the it preaches and the goals set by society.
Basic
learning needs, in accordance with current thinking, consist in “knowledge,
skills, attitudes, and values upon which individuals can build their lives,
even if they receive no formal education” (WCEFA, 1990, p. 10). In this case, both the content and the
process of the social implementation of basic education would require an
understanding of the current and potential challenges of living that confront a
people and the quality of life to which a society wishes to aspire.
The
specific problems of any social policy system, such as education, lie in the
opposition between the interest of the social group which it serves
statistically and the interest of the social actegories that it excludes or
serves poorly relative to their perceived needs. The social selectively of state educational
policy, often imposed by educational bureaucrats seeking a social resoultion of
a demand/resource crisis, generates fundamental questions concerning
educational organisation as a form of demand regulation. Educational organisation addresses itself to
questions such as: who needs to be educated, who could educate them, what do
they need to know or learn, how they should learn it, who should pay for
it? These and other questions can only
be adequately answered by answering at the same time questions concerning the
system of social power. These questions
include: what is the structure and distribution of social power in an existing
state, in what does the form of political rule consist, how is it
financed? Therefore, questions about the
nature of educational reform provide us with a window from which to view
centr-local relations and how open or closed to reform ideas a system of
political rule is likely to be.
To specify
a social services system like education, we must describe both the mode of
financing/provision as well as the method of regulation. It is through the regulatory system that the
duties and obligations of users and providers of services are structured. Unless both aspects of the system of social
services are adequately addressed, prescriptions for system reform are bound to
go awry. What is wrong with many current
proposals for change is that while they make prescriptions for the supply of
social services they say nothing aboout regualtion.
It is
possible to conceive of a taxonomy of education services system classified according to the
method of provision and the method of regulation. There are five ideal-types which could
characterise the extremes of this classificatory scheme (fig.1). The first commits the government to
total/high provisionas well as to total/high regulation of social services; we
call this a government system. The second commits the administration to high
provision and low regulation of services; we shall call this model of services
a government aided system. The third
type involves government financing but autonomous agency provision,
administration and regulation; we shall refer to this as a parastatal system
(an example would be the universityies in Zambia which receive almost all their
funds from the state, but which operate as autonomous entities). A fourth type entails high regulation by the
state of services provided with little or no public financing; we have called
this a privately provided system. The
final
Type
commits the government to minimal provision as well as minimal regulation of
social services; we have called this the informal sector arrangement.
Figure 1: Taxonomy of structure of Provision and Regulation in
Social Policy Spheres like Education and Health
|
Financing
|
Provision
|
administration
|
Quality
control
|
Type of
Institutions
|
|
Government
Government
Government
Private
Private
|
Government
Agency
Agency
Private
Private
|
Government
Government
Agency
Private
Private
|
Government
Government
agency
Government
Private
|
Government
Aided
Parastatal
(autonomous)
Private
Informal/Autonomous
|
The first
ideal-type involves educational services provided through the government
education system and administered as part of the state educational
bureaucracy. In this case, the
government not only finances the system but also provides and administers the
services through personnel who are public servants. In the second case, the administration
regulates education through a system of financing such as grants. What we have here is a method of educational
services delivery through a quasi-official network of non-governmental
organisation such as missions which are nonetheless dependent on state-provided
financing for the operation of services.
Both administration and quality control are closely monitored by the state. there is no real administrative autonomy
exercised by the agency. This in effect
amounts to a state-supervised educational service in which the overall policy
direction by the state is exercised through the allocation of public money. By this device the state maintains a public
presence in the very logistics and image of certain key non-governmental
agencies.
Examples of
this are seen in the regulation of education and medical services during the
colonial era. Colonial state control of
African social mobility through education was realised through the
decentralisation of control in educational administration, and particularly
through colonial state education authorities resting satisfied with mere
facilitation and regulation of independent producers of educational services
such as local education authorities and missionaries.
Another
illustration of the relation between the state and the producers of services
can be gained from remarks made by the Director of Medical Services to missions
in 1946 when he chided them that their administrative practices seriously
threatened both the quality and quantity of services they were expected to
provide in return for appreciable financial assistance from the Health
Department's allocation of public money.
In the
third ideal-type, the government finances operations without either providing,
administering or regulating the quality of services. In other words it is a shareholder who has
expressed interest in the product and leaves the management to an independent
agency. This is the parastatal model
where autonomy is a necessary condition in the operation of the agency. In the fourth type the government sets
"the rules of the game" and acts as a referee between providers and
users. In this case while the cost
burden of educational services is borne by private households, the state
maintains an active presence principally in the form of monitoring and ensuring
standards. this derives from the larger
question of the responsibility of the state to safeguard and promote
fundamental human rights.
In the
final extreme, the government neither provides not controls the system. there are two variants of this
ideal-type. The first may include
attempts at registration seeks a minimal level of regulation without
responsibility for financing or further control of such services, in effect
saying, "I will not bother you as long as you organise yourselves and are
not a danger to the public." The
state assumes a social/public hygiene function in such a system of social
service provision. In the second case, the
government may simply "turn a blind eye" to the activities of such a
sector.
The system
of providing educational services in any given society does not consist
entirely of a single or pure form of any of the ideal-types; in most cases it
consists of a mix of two or more. At any
given time, we describe a system of education services by the dominant mode of
providing and regulating such services, but to say one of the ideal-types is
dominant is not to say that the others are absent. Moreover, the process by which one mode
becomes dominant over others is of crucial relevance.
The supersession
of one ideal-type by another as the dominant mode of organisation involves a
political process. In other words, the
advocacy of a particular mode of providing education services is always a
political choice. therefore, to propose
one form of organisational over another has as much to do with political
muscles as with the technical merits of the organisational form. What we are saying is that there is more to
the contemporary policy issue of community involvement in basic education than
the question of rational technical organisation of educational services. The question is fundamentally political. It is the changing balance of political
forces that influences the mix of ideal-type making up the delivery system and
that determines which mode becomes dominant.
the
advocates of current proposals to reform the structure of financing social
services are saying that shifting the burden of providing social services from
government to private households removes the constraints of government-provided
services. Once this has been done, it is
believed that the problems in the present system will have been solved. So the policy options being considered in
this respect are designed to promote a privately-provided system of social
services, underwritten by the state, and in which government-aided services are
provided as an important, but always auxiliary, components. Thus advocates of fundamental educational
reform in Zambia see the organisation or educational services as a combination
of the private and publicly-aided systems.
Our own
assessment is that the system of social service provision is indeed being
altered fundamentally and that we shall break away from a situation in which
government-provided services dominate.
But there are two questions that still need to be answered. First, for what political forces is this a
desirable outcome? Second, to what
extent is this coalition of political forces likely to bring about this change
in circumstances of deteriorating
economic conditions?
MODELS OF
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT UNDER
VARYING MODES OF
PROVISION AND REGULATION
In general, basic
education provides a fundamental base for all further schooling, training, or
self-education. It also provides the basis for developing the capacity to cope
wiyh rapidly evolving and changing societies in an information age. Its
inveersal avalibility and quality are central to the human resource development
of any society. The inadequacies of an education system designed largely to
produce a labor force for a limited formal employment mareket are many. Most
notableis the inability to provide the many skills of everyday living required
by a rapidly changing society. This defect in education bring s into focus the
question of how nonformal and local
learning systems should best intract with and influience the formal school
system. This point addresses the mechanics of institutional development and the
panoply of regulations that may make possible or hinder innovation in forms of
educational provisio and access to them.
It is obvious
that forms of community involvement would be determined by the logic of forms
of provision and regulation. While acceping the premise that policies such as
basic education for all are often a response to social denands, there is need
to examine the problematic issue of state regulation through which demands for
education reforms arerefeacted. The refractive role of the public education
bureaucracy makes necessary the question of the counter role of community power
not only in the provision of education, through such modalities as self-help,
but also in its control.
For analytical
purposes, a broad distinction may be drawn between four major modes of
community involvement within the context of education provision and regulation:
anti-participatory, manipulative, incremental and participatory. The
anti-participatory mode precludes any form of community invilvement, while the
manipulative kind is carefully panned to control community involvement entirely
for the ulterior motive of serving a government`s political objectives. The
incremental type is unplanned and haphazard, is implemented on an adhoc basis
and is commonly the result either of ambivalence towards the feasibility of
community participation or simply of inefficient planning. In the participatory
mode, the state makes a genuine attempt to promote community participation,
devolving decision-making power to local institutions as a corollary of basic
social reform.
If we examine
Zambia`s case, we notice that a central policy strategy in educational reforms
has been the concept of community participation wthin a decentralised
political-administrative structure (under the 1980 Local Government Act).
However, pearse and stiefel (1980) have noted that policy concepts, such as
participation, are problematic as they mean different things to various agents
involved in any effort at social change. They insist that`the central issue of
popular participation has to do with power-exercised by some people over other
people-and by some classes over other classes`(p.11). According to pearse and
stiefel popular participation, as a means of collective action born out of
relations of power, entails the organised efforts to increase control over
resources and regulative institutionin given social situation, on the part of
groups and movements of those hitherto excluded from such control (1980, p.25).
It is possible to
see that if basic education were relegated to private provision, the regulatory
requirements of education markets would be anti-participatory. Under this
system of provision and regulation, emhasis is placed in the hands of the
school trustees or sometimes parent-teacher association in which parents are
told what the new school fees for the year are going to be. This is already the
experience of Zambia`s urban private
school, most-run
schools pre-schools.
Yet the notion of
state-directed community participation is bound to be contradictory, since any
type of officialisation of the process is bound to mean some form of control.
This often means subjecting people to crude top-down planning and resource
trasfer along with the co-opting of potentially autonomous local movements. It
can also mean a more subtle form of laissez-faire incrementalism which fails to
support community intiatives for reasons of administrative inefficiency or
political indecision. The majority of government-intiated forms of community
involvement tend to be motivated by instrumental goals such as taking advantage
of local resources or increasing political support for the government.
Thus a statist
model of community involvement assumes that there exists a consensus of interests
between government`s goals and those of the community and that the only
acceptable situation is one of collaboration by the community in official
policy. In this sense community involvement is considered as a voluntary
contribution by the people to another of the public programmes that are
supposed to contribute to national development. But the people are not expected
to take part in shaping the programme or in criticising its content. The
self-help school in Zambia is a clear example of this. Involvement of the
people in school construction schemes is sought only after the major
development parameters of education have been set by the educational bureaucray
and the role if each group has been carefully defined.Cmmunity involvement is
thus conceived of as another kind of resource injection from outside, necessary
in order to make education undertakings function smoothly.
By focusing on
the strategic character of state education policies in Zambia, we are tying to
highlight the role that the state organisation plays in structuring the social
implementation of policies, and hence their socio-political censequences. Our
emphasis in this paper is on how policy discourses designed to influence
processes of decision-making coincide with the pre-existing structure of the
state organisation of allocation. By examining allocative and decision-making
(participation) processes as typifying a single moment, that of organisation,
we can illuminate the symbolic power basis of state organisational system,
their dynamics and their contradictions. This approach has been taken form
aperspective which nuderstands educational organisation as an instance of
symbolic power involving the establishment of decision-making units, utilising
certain typical forms resources (authoritative and allocative) within
discursively mobilised forms of information flow` (Giddens, 1984,p.203). Such a
focus requires critical analysis pay attention to the strategic conduct of
institutional agents,i.e the educational bureaucracy, including, particularly,
their policy of community participation in education.
We have taken the
position that there are at least two major probles that face governments such
as Zambia`s in their attempts to traslate into practice generalised educational
policy principles like basic education and community involvement. One is the
need to ensure that every sector operates on the basis of such pricinples in
the process of national development; the other is to relate or coordinate the
activities of each sector with those of the others. In practice, the values and
principles espoused in statements of intent are often different from those
which actually determine policy formulation in detail and its implementation in
each sector.
Faced with
multiple development tasks and growing conflict of interests among social
classes and regions, and specific policy puplics within these, a government may
find it necessary to maintain a practical degree of deliberate diffusiveness
among its various policy-making or imlpementation agencies, between and within
sectors. This may be designed to permit a strategic response to particular
social categories which, even if not equitable or effecgve, appears compatible
with the broader, and often poory articulated political responsibility of
authoritative intervention. Thus, while community involvement in basic
education may appear as a principle of national state strategy, its application
may be selective and focused on those populations intitutionally amenable to
sybolic dissimulation and political reconstruction.
INFORMAL SECTOR
FORMS OF BASIC EDUCATION AND
COMMUNITY
PARTICIPATION: REACTIVE PARTICIPATION
It is important
to realise that those who use puplicly provided educational services do not do
so in a random way. In part, this is because they are subject to the forces
that structure the institutional accessibility of these services. There forces
inlcude the many organisational mechanisms of elimination, channelling or
selective admission. Under the political sanctined system of selectivity in
educational provision, the role of the education bureaucracy as gate-keepers`
is crucial in reinforcing feeling of possible social opprobrium in those who
seek access to it.
As an
illustration of this point, we can instance the internal structuring of the
educational ladder in Northern Rhodesia. Notable in that structure were the
many rungs of progression whicha candidate had to climb to advance from
Sub-Standard A to the Higher school Certificate. By structuring the education
system in this way, the deficiencies of colonical education appeared as the
failure of the individual pupil to qualify for a higher level. The fact was
that even if all pupils in Stadard 6, forexample, adequatly met the educational
criteria there were no places to accommodate them. The examination, therefore,
was a device not for certifying the eligibility of the pupil for a higher level
of education, but to give school administrators room to make the practical and
socially relevant decision of selection under the convenient cover to test
objectivity (Kalumba, 1988,p118). Wheither by imputing mental incapacity to
children throuhg the `test`, or excluding them on grouds of age, the
selectivity of the system is realised through regulation administered in a
technical manner by educational bureaucrats, colonial and post colonial. The
point is that the regulatory system of public schools are never subject to
community control. They are
considered
large technical.
The unity
imputed to education planning practices as state discourse dose not consist in
common oblects, style, concepts or thematic choices but rather the presence of
a systematic dispersion of elements where, between objects, style, concepts, or
thematic choices, there exists an order or positions in common space. This is a disciplinary space in which
education agents actively ‘downclass’ the needs of certain categories of the
population, particularly the urban and rural poor.
As in games
theory, strategy presupposes the existence of the potential for
counter-strategy. Public allocation is a
stake which, like all social stakes simultaneously presupposes and demands that
popular constituencies take part in the game and be taken in by relying upon
its rules of distribution. In this
respect, Zetter says that if policies and programmes are ‘indicators of
different assumptions and contradictory political objectives for the kind of
state that might energe’ then we also have to look to those policy publics, such
as the communities themselves, the targets of state policy discourses, as a
‘primary resource’ in any educational policy and its implementation
strategy. Consequently, the degree to
which they themselves politicise their needs and objectives becomes an
important element in th government’s own strategic stance (Zetter, 1985, p.
103)
When we
consider the act of national basic education policy planning as indicating
conditionality, differentiation, dependency, and the organisation of equity,
i.e, as ‘strategies of rationalisation’ with the potential to downclass, then
we must ask one crucial question. This
is: to what extent will rural and poor urban communities really be able to
claim advantages or to counter or obstruct those group-specific burdens that
are shifted upon them in the course of the social implementation of ostensibly
equity-oriented basic education policies?
Strategies
which agents use to avoid downclassing are grounded in the discrepancy between
opportunties objectively available at any given moment and aspirations based
upon an earlier structure of objective opportunities or potentiality. Nationalism as a struggle for access to
formerly colonial education estblished a potential or hoped- for education
trajectory which would emerge after independence. The experience for many among the rural and
urban poor is an educational system that is increasingly inacessible and by and
large irrelevant to their immediate needs for survival.
Communities
who seek to avoid downclassing in thier hoped trajectory can either produce new
education trajectories more closely matching their expectations (such as
demanding greater access or by-passing those trajectories officially provided)
or refurbish existing education trajectories like nonformal education to which
their location in socialspace give them access.
When official systems cannot deliver, certain degrees of ‘pratical
consciousness’ that are counterpoised against official discourse, occur.
What passes
for community involvement in educational policy practice starts in immediate
relation to the distribution of symbolic power, the define or label. Use of educational services, regardless of
official policy, will be structured by the
attempts of potential users to resist
downclassing, or exclusion from access, by applying their own specific social
properties, embodied in forms such as physical mobility, to centres of higher
accessibility, individual mobility and collective organisation designed to
articulate specific demands or exert strategic forms of socio-political or
economic presure. Communuty involvement is as much about collective
organisation capable of articulating demands about social entitlements as it is
about assuming responsibility for providing services.
It follows from
the above that in state policy-fields such as education, the strategies that
various social categories employ to try and escape downclassing in access to
opportunities, constitute important factors in the trasfformation of social
structures. Populations who seek to avoid down classing in access to education
can either produce alternative forms of a service denied or, in order to
enhance accese, can seek to change their location in the field`s space from
which they were `devalued`. In this regard, it is possible to predict a
progressive rise in informal educational structures and nonformal education as
a voluntary response by communities to the constaints of access in formal
education.
In order to have
an effective voice in basic education policy-making, poor groups must have some
form of bargaining power to oblige governments to take their demands seriously.
This may occur throuhg formal political structures, or` informal`
school-cooperative movements or well-organised and co-ordinated community
educational councils that are not necessarily controlled by the state.
