Inspired by a week of protests at the University of Cape Town.
Monday the 13th of February was supposed to start with students starting classes for the 2023 academic year. However, classes were halted, owing to Students’ Representative Council-led protests whose demand was that classes should not go on with a large number of students not yet registered or not having accommodation due to fee blocks.
This is not the first time the academic year has not had a great start because of tuition fees and student debt-linked protests. This could not be surprising considering that the institution is allegedly still living in the era of protecting the wealthy capitalist class and disadvantaging the poor child of the bourgeoisie.
The University of Cape Town charges exorbitant fees. The Government on the other hand is inadequately financing underprivileged students through NSFAS. This makes it impossible for lower class citizens to have equal access to education, which is their constitutional right that needs to be protected at all costs. But nobody cares, why, because the system is designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.
To show that the government does not care, I take you to the fact that the ministry of education so comfortably reduced funding to students, yet at the same time parliament, through its majority, does not want to hold President Ramaphosa accountable for the Phala-Phala money scandal. This scandal is representative of all the taxpayers’ monies that government officials squander, instead of using tha6t money to invest in the future of the students.
The current education system is less ideal because it encourages professionals to treat education as a commodity because once students get a qualification, they want to use that qualification to get back the money they used to attain it. What is wrong with commodifying education is that graduates will be reluctant to serve their communities out of goodwill, they will be calculative in every service they have to offer. Hence one can find a township from which engineers come that is underdeveloped. It is not that the engineers it raised are incapable, but they want to be paid huge money to compensate the monies they paid in these educational institutions.
My dream is that one day all teachers that come from lower class families to come together to offer free extra time lessons to struggling students, engineers to voluntarily improve infrastructure in their communities, lawyers to offer pro-bono services to the oppressed poor, but would that be possible if the colonial education system commodifies education, making it hard for qualified students to have a heart of giving back to the society?
