The bait-and-switch and echo chamber of school privatization in South Africa

Advocates of right-wing reform in South Africa stridently demand a variety of responses ranging from outright privatization of education and the withdrawal of the state, to various market-friendly policies. This chapter outlines the size and shape of school privatization in South Africa and the companies and agencies that profit and promote privatization of education. A recent editorial on South Africa’s schooling system provides a useful example of the functioning of the echo chamber: it is a classic bait-and-switch maneuver applied to schooling. There is an increasingly insistent view suggesting that the privatization of education, whether through high-cost or low-cost private schooling, charter schools or the voucher system, is the solution to the problems of education systems. However, the purveyors of these ideas do not speak to the adverse consequences of privatization. South Africa has a proud history of resistance in and through education. This resistance has generated popular epistemologies and pedagogies against racial capitalism.