Dr Lwazi Lushaba - Strategic Planning Session

Strong ethical standards as the foundations for Nation Building and Paatriotism.
Abstract
Education as an Instance for the Ideological Social Reproduction of Society
Within South African public discourse, a dominant view exists that the school (and
education generally) is in addition to teaching the technical subject matter a veritable site of socialisation. Which is to say, it is one of the key sites, alongside the Church, family, political parties, etc, where citizens are socialised - where modern subjects learn public norms and etiquette necessary for the cohesive functioning of society. However, in a curious move backed up by liberal-rational or bourgeois social thought this view self-servingly projects the school, education more specifically as an objective rational value-free enterprise, more pointedly as ideologically neutral. In the proposed presentation I want to read against this dominant understanding an alternative viewpoint informed by Althusser’s (1969) insistence in his paper, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ that education be understood as an instance for the ideological production of the conditions necessary for the social reproduction of society. Ultimately, the thesis I seek to establish is that any political regime which does not employ its education system to produce the ideological conditions necessary for the reproduction of society in its image or outlook cannot maintain its hold over state power for a long period.