Parental 'choice': the liberty principle in education finance - Bekisizwe Ndimande

Despite the promise of equal educational opportunities for all, most public schools in the townships of South Africa have remained poorly funded and thus have become dysfunctional. As a result most poor parents from townships have started to transfer their children to schools with better resources and education facilities in the suburban areas. However, the emerging problem in this transfer is the high school fees imposed by well-resourced public schools in the suburbs. In this essay, I problematise two complex scenarios: one the one hand, township schools are not funded adequately, and on the other, the cost of education in wealthy public schools is too high for poor parents to afford. I argue that the lack of funding in these poor schools and the imposition of high school fees in wealthy schools ought to be contextualised within the broader hegemonic tendencies that continue to marginalise poor people.
From: Perspectives in Education, Vol. 24 (2), pp. 143-156