Censorship - Another Hydra-Headed Monster in Education
Throughout the development of education in this country, the use of lies and propaganda to varying degrees of mendacity has been a very powerful weapon. Censorship is usually taken to mean the banning or suppression of facts and opinions from print, the electronic media or in the exercise of freedom of speech. But so multi-faceted and extended have become the implications of censorship in this country, especially in the schools, technikons, colleges and universities and the homes of people, that it is necessary to have another hard and critical look at the many ways in which certain ideas, opinions and communication generally have been prevented from reaching the vast majority of the population. This fact applies in both developed societies and the many countries which continue to suffer the effects of centuries of colonial subjugation by the metropolitan powers of Europe, North America and Japan. But South Africa has experienced up to the present day some of the crudest as well as some of the most sophisticated means of mental conditioning or mental enslavement of its people.
The education systems have for decades been battle zones of such processes. Does censorship mean simply banning from publication books, newspapers, pamphlets, advertisements and other forms of the printed word? If one considers that the large number of illiterate men, women and children do not understand the written word then this form of censorship has been the most absolute of all. The functionally illiterate, of whom there are very large numbers, are equally the victims of this absolute denial of access to written material. And it should be reasonable to claim that because of the problems arising from the use of so many languages in the school there must be many millions more for whom books are closed books!
Against such simple assessments, the failure to provide millions of children in the schools with the books needed in classrooms is in effect a form of censorship by denial - without going the route of legal or autocratic banning of reading material. This aspect of the current chaos in the schools leads to another, namely, that the youth grow up not knowing the signal importance of books - in general, as vehicles in the development of individuals and of society as a whole. In another sense, the absence of books opens the way for the proliferation of illustrated magazines which demand the minimum of reading skill and a sub-minimum of intelligence to lap up their cretinous content. The overwhelming kinds of material presented in cinemas, on television and through the video shops - that are to be found among even the poorest communities - exploit this very weakness among the illiterate, the near-illiterate and the other categories of victims at whom the electronic and print media aim their weapons of mass mental starvation.
Poverty is another vicarious catalyst in the rapid decline of access to worthwhile education material. In modern capitalist societies the cost of books in general has risen to levels which place all kinds of publications beyond the reach of all except high-earners and those who need publications as part of the means to earn a living - like doctors, lawyers, lecturers and journalists. The fact that there are libraries which provide an alternative source of reading material and electronically-recorded facilities does not make up for the above-named form of economic censorship.
These forms of censorship all contribute towards what George Orwell called "the prevention of literature". In South Africa they have come to dominate the lives of young and old in one way or another.
At another level recent developments in the control and management of the Press have set in motion a more powerful, active, positive force in the deliberate process of conditioning the thinking of those able to afford the daily or weekly papers. The newspaper and magazine world was divided in the past between the Chamber of Mines - through its Argus group - and the "Afrikaner" capitalist cohorts through their Nasionale Pers, Republican Press and other satellite publishers.
The Sowetan - the daily paper with the highest circulation by far - was an Argus Group publication. City Press is an Afrikaner-sponsored daily. In more recent times the powerful Chamber of Mines group has sold out to Independent Newspapers, an Ireland-based mega-Press. The influential English Guardian newspaper has taken over the Mail and Guardian weekly publication. And foreign mind-benders, propagandists and electronic spin-doctors have provided finance, technology and management expertise for both radio-stations and television-channels on a scale little realised by the man or woman in the street. The SABC English programme is a Time-Warner offspring, which links up with ex-trade union bureaucrats who have injected workers' trade union funds in to this sector of information technology. The Anglo American Corporation has hived off to the Johnnic organisation some of its assets. These now concentrate on what they term "infortainment" industries, with the Sunday Times and Financial Mail within this stable. The Voice of America (VOA) is another of the enormously rich, world-wide radio networks that largely determine the content and style of several "independent" radio stations which have been created to provide opportunities for "previously disadvantaged" communities.
This is a mere part of the institutional censorship programme that dictates what the readers, listeners and viewers will have access to and how. The industry is heavily financed. It buys up at all levels the most suitable (for its purpose) writers and programmers. They form part of the world-wide means of "manufacturing consent" as Noam Chomsky has described the leit motif of the industry.
Thus in South Africa the Independent Newspapers have sought out a mix of editors, field journalists, cubs and management that have to serve one overriding purpose: to secure support for and ensure the success of the compromise that was given form and purpose in the period 1985-94 and led to the creation of the "1994" style of governing. This group is not alone in that purpose.
What is of significance is the creation of an extensive range of new meaning for words that have to condition the thinking of people at all levels of society. So the repeated use of the terms "our first democratic government" or "our first democratic elections" is aimed at creating the belief that bourgeois, capitalist democracy is a democracy for all. The repeated use of the word "equity" to describe the aim of the process of reforming education is notoriously a bit of "newspeak" such as that that George Orwell so brilliantly exemplified in his novel 1984. The use of "equity" has been proved over and again in our columns to be the shoddy disguise for a schooling system dictated to the Ministry of Education by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). This practise of giving words the meanings that the users would like readers and listeners to accept is but the extension of the Humpty-Dumpty episode in Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll's story was intended to amuse youthful readers. Modern Humpty-Dumptys are conscienceless, highly paid hacks who have no hesitation in paralysing the thinking of both young and old.
With the process of censorship - which rely on the denial of access to knowledge and independent, rational thinking - one can collate processes which actively deceive, disarm and both mentally and psychologically prepare people for exploitation by oppressive classes. The entire picture then becomes a frightening one indeed. During the past months and in the ensuing period the country will have been subjected to every conceivable trick in the books of the defenders of the "new democratic South Africa" - whether they operate in the field of "infortainment", finance, justice, health services and the vast network of educational institutions, formal and informal. The elections of 2 June 1999 will have provided a volcanic outburst of all the forms of censorship - the self-same forms that are visited upon schools, colleges and universities to starve to death the vigorous growth in knowledge and defence of liberty upon which the future of a true democracy must necessarily rest. Education for liberation, as does education for democracy, means explicitly and implicitly that we must challenge and thwart whatever methods are used to cut off the life-lines of knowledge, skill, independence of thought and self-fulfilment in the schools. In the process we will be able to keep open the life-lines of progress towards the legitimate aims of a real democracy.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL.69 #3, OFFICIAL ORGAN
OF THE TEACHERS' LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, JUNE 1999]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
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