The Right to Learn – A resource for teachers, activists and community educators

Pam Christie’s The Right to Learn: The Struggle for Education in South Africa is a relevant and elucidating introductory text on the history and politics of education in South Africa. In the book, there is a call to action, a reminder that education is inherently political, and bound up with systems of power. As a result, it has been used by generations of activists and scholars to understand and reimagine education – notably it has been reprinted nine times, most recently in 2006.

The Right to Learn starts with the following line: “As we write this book the education system in South Africa is in crisis”. These words are as compelling today as when they were first published in 1985. The continued relevance of the book is evident from the first few pages as  readers are engaged with fundamental questions about the purposes of education, such as  “How do schools fit in with the wider society? Can education be used to resolve the problems of society? Can education be used to bring about social change?” (2006, p.12). In the first chapter, Christie unsettles taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of schooling and shows how vastly different and opposing social imaginaries and ideas about the purposes of education have shaped political struggles over schooling in South Africa. Three differing political stances are introduced, namely, ‘conservatives’, ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’, which are used throughout the book to frame and illustrate the varying responses to education policy in South Africa. These interpretive lenses are useful to contemporary readers because they provide a framework for parsing through responses to current issues and policy manoeuvres in the field of education. They remind us that interests and investments in the present arrangements often differ and that a critical analysis needs to take into account both how and why such differences exist.

The book is set against the backdrop of mounting resistance to apartheid in schools following the 1976 Soweto Uprising and massive inequalities in educational access and provisioning. Yet, many of these challenges are ongoing: education continues to be a site of struggle, it remains deeply divided along lines of race and class, while it is mired in the structural legacies of the past. As a text, it emerged from the work of the popular education movement of the 1980s and in response to the grassroots community activism projects of SACHED and others. Central to this was the idea that knowledge has a social function – a sense that knowing and doing should be intertwined.

The Right to Learn is written in a register accessible to anyone wanting to learn more about schooling in South Africa without oversimplifying complex social issues. In it, Christie adopts a problem-posing approach, often raising questions which invite readers to think more critically about the purposes of education. With the inclusion of illustrations, speech bubbles, quotations, timelines and tables alongside references and reading lists, it is an engaging popular education resource. As a result, we have found it useful across a variety of contexts: in our classrooms, in workshops with teachers and young people, as well as in academic writing. In all these settings, the text has facilitated meaningful grappling with the history and politics of education in South Africa.

The Right to Learn helps us to recognise long-standing patterns of race, class and gender inequality within schooling arrangements in South Africa, and demonstrates how a historical vision can be helpful in thinking about new policy reforms. One example of this is the treatment of the De Lange Report (1981). Christie discusses how perceptions of the proposed reforms might differ on the basis of political views and/or social position. She writes, for example, that radicals saw the De Lange Report as the ‘modernization of apartheid’ (p.64). Ironically, today, three-stream education along the vision of the De Lange Report has been re-introduced as a pilot project in the Western Cape, as a policy innovation, without much opposition – perhaps an example of the kind of historical and policy amnesia which The Right to Learn sought to dispel.

In the final chapter of the 1987 edition, Christie asks “Where do we go to from here?” Her response is that “there are no ready-made solutions”. However, she suggests several alternative visions and returns again to the book’s central question: What is education for? This prompt has ongoing relevance in 2024 as we imagine the future of education and work towards the realisation of the right to learn, and for that day when all our children may truly go to school ‘together’.

Written by Hannah Carrim and Ashley Visagie

Pam Christie gave bua-lit permission to keep the book as a resource on our website. The book can be accessed here.

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