[YCLSA Discussion] Malema's Matric results : My second bite

[Mondli Hlatshwayo]

Dear comrades Many comrades have also noted the fact that even today the current education system is clearly against the interests of the working class. We have been to township and rural schools where you can clearly see that the conditions are not conducive for learning to take place. Shortages of equipment, teachers and so on do not promote a culture of learning. If you go to what we used to call model c school, you will discover a different scenario. The ruling class, those who are the beneficiaries of BEE and the middle class are able to send their kids to better schools. Surely, these kids are able to excel. Close to fifty-teen years after formal apartheid, our education system has not been transformed to serve the needs of the working class. What we are seeing is the perpetuation of the education imbalances which we saw under apartheid. Students from the townships and rural areas are, once again, victims of inferior education. The pitiable school feeding schemes are collapsing. I remember attending a rally at the Harry Gwala Stadium (before it was named after comrade HG) in Edendale, a few years before the elections of 1994, where the late comrade Harry Gwala spoke about a need for proper school feeding scheme for working class children. Today, working class kids are starving at schools. Even if you look at tertiary education, you will notice that the high fees are clearly excluding working class students. You can take this further and examine the curriculum. You will also notice that the curriculum and the whole culture are channeling students to the careers that serve capitalist accumulation. Today, some of the petty bourgeois elements who consider themselves as being “educated” would say to us, “Are you still believing in those outdated ideas of Marx? That was good for passing sociology and political studies.” What is unfortunate is that some of these elements who make big pronouncements about formal education forget that they used to write bad essays. A number of them failed law, economics and maths many times until the poor lecturers decided to grant them academic amnesty. They struggled to meet even their own “academic” standards. Is this not hypocritical, comrades? I am not saying comrades must not study. Yes, if we get the opportunity we should study but we must study with an understanding that academia is bourgeois terrain. We must not buy into the ideology of academia because academia is a guild system. It is characterized by inequalities. If you are professor or a doctor, you are considered to be the coolest dude (person) in town. As socialists we have a different morality. We value class struggle because we believe it is a source of radical transformation. We also believe in collective knowledge and the sharing of ideas. In other words, in our struggles we do not have professors but we have comrades who are here to work collectively.     Yours in the struggle for the total emancipation of the working class Mondli Hlatshwayo 0843773003 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to yclsa-eom-forum@googlegroups.com or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---