Purist or Pervert? - Professor Jonathan Jansen on the State of Education in South Africa

While I respect the canons of intellectual rigour, one of whose refrains is "play the ball and not the man", there is a compelling case of diversion when dealing with the caricatures of Professor Jonathan Jansen - not least because the professor's consistent anti-state posture is blatantly ideological and emotionally jarring for people like myself who graduated as educators under his tutelage.

We invested four good years of our formative years in Jansen's school of education at the University of Durban-Westville and therefore are shocked that he trained us to loiter in doubt and gloom concerning our vocation. Few facts about the good professor's background might help illuminate the roots of his kismet prophesy.

Prof Jansen has New Unity Movement (NUM) leanings. The NUM was a political organisation that never really won the hearts and minds of the masses, despite producing some great minds and political activists. In the 1980s in particular, it had a sect that paraded as ultra-radicals with Trotskyite rhetoric. Instead of working with the United Democratic Front (UDF), it fashioned itself as the "real left" mass organisation. Fact is, it never really was the vanguard of the people and missed seizing its moment in history when it failed to embed its work within the broader Mass Democratic Movement initiatives.

True to the tradition of the egoistic sect of the NUM, Professor Jansen offers no concrete alternative in his anti-state tirade especially against our education reforms which he holds in contempt. That is what his kin mastered in the 1980s. Instead of directing their anger at the common enemy, the apartheid regime, it wasted time contesting the UDF. Once we learned from Prof Jansen: "dissent is part of political commitment but it must be accompanied by concrete solutions". Where are the solutions Professor Jansen? Concrete and scientific interventions that will help South Africa avoid becoming, in your own words, "yet another failed African state ... because the level set is so low".

Schooled in pseudo-radical custom, the professor is "seemingly well-versed in government and the ANC weaknesses". Students of political theory will do well to remind us that radicals are not necessarily revolutionaries. Purists too can also be radical in their quest to preserve what they perceive to be "truths" and "correct". The unpublished January 9 Opinion Analysis and the March 15 column in The Times (The Future Looks Bleak) by the professor bear all the hallmarks of "purity"; what he thinks is absolutely wrong with our education system. When purists offer analyses, they do so believing that there is only one possibility or solution - that is what they themselves believe to be correct. Nothing less!

Professor Jansen writes in January:

"... if I had to make the choice with my own children today, I would consider not sending my child to school in South Africa, for one simple reason: I do not trust a system ... But you would not sense this crisis in the Grade 12 examinations because the major newspapers, with one or two exceptions, have swallowed the lies from the Department of Basic Education ..."

In The Times of March 15 the professor enquires: what does the future of education looks like in South Africa. Having offered some biased anecdotal evidence, the article headlines: "the future looks bleak".

Call this line of enquiry cynicism: but are these statements not a perverted idea of transformation dynamics in a society in transition? First, how can a professor of education pass a vote of no confidence in the education system yet parade as a leader in educator development in the country? What message is he sending to the hundreds of students like myself who spent time and scarce resources preparing to join the education profession? Unless, of course, his graduates ought to be an exception to the rule; a rare breed of educators who will go out there and occasion a seismic shift in the system! Perverts are dangerous for they exaggerate their potency. That is where they intersect with purists.

Secondly, he argues in the 9 January Opinion Analysis that "talk to any employer in business and industry and they will tell you the same story: today's graduates are weak, even incompetent, in the basic skills of reasoning, writing ..." Yet, he confidently presides over an institution of higher learning that churns out thousands of graduates each year. Unless his is a special institution, a contraption that fabricates a special range of products that can float above the muddle our education system has become.

In which case then we wonder why he continues to produce "stock" for the employers who don't trust university graduates and the education sector in particular that he himself suspects. Is Jansen like a fat salesman who overzealously markets a sliming product he has never tested nor came across a person it has worked on? That would be intellectual dishonesty - a misdemeanour parallel, if not heavier, than my violation of the "play the ball not the man" code.

Thirdly, my limited memory can't help but recall Professor Jansen's three-year 'shock therapy' at the University of Durban-Westville. This was a time (1995 - 1997) when the good professor said what seemed merely controversial yet very ideological. Many students were depressed when he publicly bullied them for not knowing the capital cities of Sudan and the Central African Republic and for using a semicolon instead of a comma.

I can't help but recall his statements casting aspersions on black Africans and their ability to manage and lead. Repeatedly, he asked:

"What is wrong with Africans? Is there something innately wrong with them that they mismanage their countries? Why is Africa failing to catch up with Europe many years after independence?"

Given his mammon of knowledge and analytical adroitness, students would have benefited had the professor explained why Africa is faltering. No analysis of the political economy of post-colonial Africa was given. Let alone the history of nation state formation and its impact on "new" states. Instead, he left us doubtful; contemplating that indeed a possibility exists of an innate incapacity to govern on the continent.

Yet, in another opinion piece, totally contemptuous of the milieu and the occasion, he accuses the State President of not advancing a "reasoned debate and factual correction ... if the historical evidence was too much to hold ... the President would perhaps have appealed to common sense".

What "reasoned debate and factual correction" did the professor offer to his students regarding the "historical evidence" of why Africa is struggling to regenerate itself post-independence? He tells the President to respond to Pieter Mulder's falsehood by citing scholars like Nigel Worden and William Beinart. But, as Jansen's graduates, we have no recollection of him citing Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja and Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane who have written extensively about the challenges confronting post-colonial Africa.

A bombshell came when, in 1996, he told his final-year students that "Mandela chose Sibusiso Bhengu as Education Minister instead of Ihron Rensburg because Mandela was appeasing the Zulus ..." He asserted that - much to his own delight - Rensburg should have become Minister or Director-General of Education but "was overlooked because he is not Nguni". He explained to us that Professor Rensburg had played a role bigger than that of Professor Bhengu in the National Education Coordinating Council, so he was a deserving candidate to lead the Department of Education.

Now that we know history better, we struggle to comprehend why such a preposterous idea was punted to unsuspecting students by this good professor.

The most unfortunate thing with this reasoning is that Jansen dragged into his suspect theory the name of a person who had nothing to do with his existential preoccupations of race and ethnic identity. Knowing what we know of former President Nelson Mandela and Professor Rensburg, ethnic considerations are the least of their fixations. Besides, in the period in question, Professor Rensburg was already playing a leading role in the transformation project and there was no record of him entering Jansen's ethnic and racial amphitheatre.

We also remember Jansen's Cosmopolitan magazine treatise: "10 Reasons why OBE will fail", later published in various academic journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Education (see Vol. 23, Issue 3, 1998).

From everything he said to us at final-year and honours classes, it later became apparent that he detested education reforms more so because he was personally not involved in their formulation. The professor directly and indirectly expressed concern that experts like himself were not core to the construction of the new curriculum in South Africa. As 21-year-olds, we sympathised with him. However, now that we are discerning, we can see through what the professor really meant.

The aggregation of these historical facts together with ongoing anti-state tirade combines to occasion emotional trauma in some of us. We struggle to understand why someone would train teachers and thousands of other graduates but suspect their profession, proficiency and confidence. No wonder, many of his graduates continue to walk away from the teaching profession, and employers justify keeping black graduates in training programmes for unreasonable periods.

Critical manifestos have an important place in democracy. So do scientific solutions to intractable problems facing our country. Society expects methodical solutions from our intellectuals, not tantrums and sustained perverted narratives of prejudice, racism and failure. Logic should distinguish conscientious intellectuals from "purists" and "perverts"!

Our constitutional democracy enjoins us to collectively own challenges of transformation. Equally, society expects all hands on deck, working selflessly to create a better life for all. Leaders like Professor Jansen cannot expect praise when they make such bigoted assertions:

"... if I had to make the choice with my own children today, I would consider not sending my child to school in South Africa, for one simple reason: I do not trust a system ..."

In the March 15 column (The Times) he concludes: "... what does the future of education look like in South Africa? ...the overall system will remain in a state of stable crisis well into the future. Not a pretty picture."

If the professor expects commendation for "speaking truth to power", "challenging ruling elites" and "celebrating excellence in other countries", thanks to the potency of his "crystal ball", he must equally accept a reciprocal inkling paraphrased by Slavoj Zizek in Living in the End Times. He writes: "Rousseau already understood perfectly the falsity of multiculturalist admires of foreign cultures when, in Emile, he warned of the philosopher who loves Tartars in order to be dispensed from loving his neighbours".

Admires of foreign cultures who prejudicially suspect their neighbours are as good as perverts who claim purity!

>> Busani Ngcaweni studied under Professor Jonathan Jansen at the University of Durban-Westville. This article first appeared in ANC Today, the weekly online newsletter of the African National Congress.

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