New ways of understanding: a governmentality analysis of basic education policy in post-apartheid South Africa

Prinsloo, Estelle Helena

Title: New ways of understanding: a governmentality analysis of basic education policy in post-apartheid South Africa
Creator: Prinsloo, Estelle Helena
Subject: South Africa -- Department of Basic Education
Subject: Basic education -- Government policy -- Research -- South Africa
Subject: Post-apartheid era -- Education -- South Africa
Subject: Educational change -- Research -- South Africa
Subject: South Africa -- Social conditions
Date Issued: 2013
Date: 2013
Type: text
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MA
Identifier: vital:2751
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1001384
Description: Social problems that are identified by government policy are articulated in ways that confer the responsibility of their management onto the state. In this way, policy reform serves as a means to justify political rule, as the ‘answers’ to policy failures are located within the realm of state intervention. This role of policy is maintained by the traditional definition of policy as it enables policies to be presented as the outcome of ‘necessary’ actions taken by state institutions to better the wellbeing of citizens. Since 1994, mainstream research on basic education policy in South Africa has employed traditional understandings of policy and its function. In doing so, these inquiries have failed to question the very idea of policy itself. They have also neglected to identify the productive role played by policy in the practice of power. To illuminate the necessary limits of policy reform, an alternative approach to analyse basic education policy is necessary. This thesis premises policy as discourse and advances a governmentality analysis of basic education policy during the first fifteen years of democracy (1994-2009) in South Africa. By drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the study argues that government – ‘those actions upon the actions of others’ – during this period in South Africa was informed by both a liberal and a neo-liberal mentality of rule. The tensions between these two rationalities contributed to the continuation of apartheid’s socio-economic inequalities in the postapartheid era; an outcome buttressed by the contradictory impulses within basic education policy. By considering policy as a productive translation of governmental reasoning, the boundaries of intervention for future policy reforms are highlighted. These show that the inequalities that were perpetuated during the first fifteen years of democracy justify policy responses similar to those responsible for their production
Format: 214 leaves
Format: pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University
Publisher: Faculty of Humanities, Political and International Studies
Language: English
Rights: Prinsloo, Estelle Helena

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