When I think about how student protest over
fees has been unfolding - now as #FeesMustFall and in the past as
#SayNoToFeeIncrease - an interesting pattern emerges.
Firstly, fee increases has been the sole
preserve of management, bar the University Councils looking into the matter
before it is finalised. Yet again, the dynamics in Councils tilt in favour of
management prerogative. Which is why SRC leaders, who sit in the Council, will
be seen leading protest against fee increment alongside the student body, and
now the #FeesMustFall, after the effect. Do the SRCs lose debate in Councils?
Are they out-maneuvered?
Secondly, during negotiations and
accompanying protests, the common behaviour by management, who, in the main are
products of "older" generation of the very colonial and
parent-to-child system of teaching and learning, is that of firstly lording
over the student, then bullying them. When that tactic fails to bring students
into line, it tops up the actual violation by using force of security personnel
and police force.
A student duly responds in the way they know
how, with methods evolving from talk, then organising to protest, and
ultimately resorting to open aggression and violence. It is at this stage of
student response where the violence by university administration - a lording,
parent-to-child colonial posture - reveals its force. The justification
is often that the student was being brought into line to maintain public order
and safeguard private property. The complicity by administration to student's volcanic
fury remains a suppressed narrative.
The #FeesMustFall campaign is not just about
the no-fee education. Through the #RhodesMustFall campaign we have witnessed
the multiple demands by the students for university system to transform. It is
a call for the nation to revise a colonial setup wherein what is taught, how it
is taught, and who is teaching it, characterises the supremacy of colonial
culture.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
calls this a "banking concept of education." Through this education, he
argues that, 'knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves
knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.' He goes further
to say, 'projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the
ideology of oppression, negates knowledge education and knowledge as processes
of inquiry.'
Freire indirectly obviates how management and
government leaders often take a similar or complementary stance of lording over
students, then manipulating them, then bullying and ultimately using physical
violence through clandestine security personnel and conflicted but
forced-to-do-duty police force. It is a tactic to beat a child into submission,
forcing him or her to accept the colonial arrangement which feeds the coloniser
and its gate-keeping administrator while providing affirmations that they are
indeed doing the child in the colony a favour.
Comments like "do not miss the academic
programme," by Vice Chancellor Adam Habib of Wits University and "who
will employ you (students) when you are behaving like this," are but
evidence that the parent is refusing to accept a child as an equal partner to
the "processes of enquiry." ‘We are crashing’ says the child. ‘But we
are trying to get enough airbags,’ says the parent. The parent, the
administrator of colonial arrangement, is nervous that the fitness of car he is
driving is questionable and therefore feels the need to suppress the child, to
safeguard his/her position as the necessary opposite who is justifying his/her
existence as driver.
Freire also says, ‘The capability of banking
education to minimise or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate
their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to
have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their
“humanitarianism” to preserve the profitable situation. Thus they react almost
instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical
faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks
out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.’
The university management and government leaders
are suppressing the inevitable. We are causing friction that pronounces the
unintended labour pains of new and much needed pedagogy more loudly than it
would have been had “problem-posing” dialogue been accepted from the beginning.
We have an opportunity to revise the colonial arrangement of education, because
that is where the problem of money to fund it arises. We have an opportunity to
fling open new and mutual possibilities for the processes of inquiry (learning)
to emerge. We must also accept that change is not easy and it certainly
threatens the comfortable positions of some stakeholders, especially the
administrators and their commercial counterparts who extract from the system
the profits and substitute labour to maintain a dominant parent-to-child
colonial narrative.
Parents are dispensing punishment to children as they
usually do. It is a language of reaction, by the one who knows, to suppress the
creative power and credulity of children, who know nothing, to call off their challenge
for the system to re-imagine itself. Seneca said, 'Repeated punishment, while
it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all... just as trees that
have been trimmed throw out again countless branches.'
