Should we accept equality is great if it means everything’s awful for everyone?

The Congress of South African Students (COSAS) has reiterated its call to rid the education sector of private schools, this time focusing on the Independent Examination Board. Private education gets better results, so how will the kids be afforded their constitutionally promised equality?

COSAS is an interesting body representing “students at pre tertiary level in all South African secondary and high schools”. It seems like an excellent cause to champion the interests of a group that are probably underrepresented otherwise and COSAS has done some historically brilliant things. Despite only forming nearly three years after the Soweto Uprisings, which they claim as their “catalyst,” they played important roles in in the struggle during the 1980s and were even banned out of official existence.

Fast-forward to today, however, and you’ll find gems like, “IEB must be scrapped as an urgent matter because it has an element of making other learners feel less more important than others who have the privilege of getting different results even before them”.

Of course, I initially met the statement with laughter, and then reflected. While I do think such a statement (and ideology) is worthy of ridicule, I’m not oblivious to the failures of the public school system – so while it’s not right to mock the illiteracy of others, it is right to point it out and demand action be taken.

I think this is what COSAS is trying to do, although they’re seemingly demanding that action be taken in the wrong direction. But this is symptomatic of a growing narrative in South Africa. It doesn’t seem like there’s much care about how good the best is, as long as there’s some form of equality … and it appears that equality need not be of any sort of standard.

But the promise of equality is there. It’s in section 9 of the constitution, even before dignity. Incidentally, there’s also section 29, which allows for independent educational institutions that “maintain standards that are not inferior to standards at comparable public educational institutions”, but COSAS seems to gleefully gloss over that bit.

It’s just too easy to latch on to some single ideal like equality, isolate it and then build a narrative around it. However, it’s strategies like that which ailing organisations must take to try to maintain some degree of relevance.

Much like their older sibling SAUS (the South African Union of Students) which focuses on tertiary students, COSAS seemingly delivers little more than the occasional toothless statement of late. On the one hand, it’s a shame because there is value in gauging the voice of the school-going youth. On the other, more pragmatic and realistic, hand, giving the voice of a couple of million to a mere few who posted a grand total of three statements in 2019 with no mandate to gauge that voice seems dangerous. Oh, and I should mention that their Facebook page featured a hiatus of posts between a September 2017 Happy Birthday Winnie post and a 6 January 2020 shared appreciation post for Last Town Hip Hop Festival.

While I didn’t understand the #WeUp hashtag invoked, I do understand that, as an organisation, I don’t think COSAS has taken themselves seriously enough to warrant being taken seriously on policy positions … and with an internal policy position that we should decimate the most broadly functional part of the national education system (being the part that the state largely leaves alone), I think it’s a good thing that they not be taken seriously.

They are philosophically correct, though, that we need to address some issues in the equality aspect – but having a look at their website’s About page, I noticed an interesting, yet seemingly neglected concept, in the last word of their mission statement:

COSAS strives for and is committed to achieve dynamic, free, fair, quality and compulsory education for all, for a spirit of cooperation and trust between students, parents and teachers with values of:

Non racialism

Non sexism

Democracy

Equity

Redress

Quality

There are many ways to climb a mountain, each with its own set of considerations, but I’m afraid that COSAS has elected to take the unmaintained cable cart during load shedding, in the dark, during a storm, with no support.

As the punk rockers in NoFX say, “…there’s no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated”.

Lawyer Richard Anthony Chemaly.

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