Roger Deacon

Too Dependent to Participate: Ward Committees and Local Democratisation in South Africa

Abstract Will participatory local government structures help deepen democracy in South Africa? That is the proclaimed purpose of the ward committee system, the centre-piece of post-apartheid local government reform, intended to facilitate deliberative democratic decision making. Drawing on a case study of the Msunduzi municipality, it is argued here that ward committees, as yet barely functional seven years since first being established, have from the outset been caught up in relations of dependency with ward councillors, political parties and the municipality itself, and that these relations threaten to undermine the democratic dividends that the committees are expected to yield.

Education policy studies in South Africa, 1995–2006

This article reports on findings pertaining to scholarship in education policy drawn from a wider study on all education research in South Africa from 1995 to 2006. This study, which defined education research as broadly pertaining to teaching and/or learning, obtained extensive data from a wide range of sources, including universities, public institutions, NGOs, Education and Training Authorities, museums, publishers, donor agencies, trade unions, conferences, journals and electronic databases. The levels, scale, educational sectors and disciplinary areas of each entry in the resulting 10,315‐strong database were identified, and a random sample of 600 texts was analysed in order to distinguish primary research themes. This article summarises seven themes in education policy studies, including policy idealism, policy critiques, language in education policy, higher education policy, further education and training policy, the nature and effects of educational decentralisation and the relationship between education policy and the market.

From Confinement to Attachment: Michel Foucault on the Rise of the School

This article develops a Foucauldian account of the rise of the modern school, on the basis of a thorough examination of all references to education in Foucaults work. It analyses the seventeenth-century origins of mass schooling and traces its development up to the nineteenth century. It identifies several overlapping stages in this multifaceted and largely contingent development, particularly a fundamental shift from a negative to a positive conception of the school. This Foucauldian understanding of the rise of schooling as a disciplinary technology suggests that an initial focus on the exclusion or confinement of disorderly groups was gradually superseded by a focus on the inclusion or “attachment” of diverse individuals and on the development of their potential. It concludes by cautioning against over-simplistic applications of Foucaults work to the field of education.

Equity and excellence: the emergence, consolidation and internalization of education development at the University of Natal

Education development in South Africa emerged during the transition from apartheid to democracy, in a context especially marked by political and financial pressures. This case study of the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu‐Natal) demonstrates how a strategy combining equity with excellence aimed to facilitate increased access to the institution, while maintaining existing standards. Central to this was the creation of a new academic subject, the ‘disadvantaged student’ from an ‘underdeveloped’ background, which provided a justification for an all‐encompassing institutional transformation, involving an intensification of institutional governance, a rapidly changing student profile, and power struggles between lecturers and tutors. After having bolstered its scientific credentials, education development was internalized by the institution which it had helped to transform, and is now an integral part of its merged successor.