Radical Democracy and Educational Experiments: Lessons for South Africa from Brazil and Rojava

ABSTRACT

South Africa faces several massive, interconnected challenges that reverberate through its political economy, society and education system. This paper offers lessons for the current conjuncture by exploring radical democracy and educational experiments in two other contexts: Brazil, as a point of close comparison, and Rojava (northern Syria), as a point for dissimilar comparison but which offers a “real utopia”. The Brazilian student movement (2015–16) involved several waves of mass school occupations in the “student spring” (primavera secundarista), with students demanding free, quality public education and, within the occupations, experimenting with democratic, dialogical, caring educational spaces. The Revolution in Rojava, emerging in 2012 and continuing to date, offers an alternative model of social organisation guided by women’s liberation, ecological harmony, and “Democratic Confederalism”, a form of anti-capitalist radical democracy. It has provided fertile ground for a profoundly different education system from the statist, authoritarian models previously imposed in the region. This paper draws out several prominent themes from each context, drawing these into conversation with the contemporary South African context. First, the movements demonstrate the pedagogical importance of language and culture, history and social dynamics, the decommodification of education, feminism and ecology. Second, they highlight the political importance of education for self-organisation in relation to broader processes of social transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• Rojava
• Syria
• Brazil
• student movement
• social movement
• radical democracy
• revolution

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that this work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, South Africa. I would like to thank Thais Tiriba, Emre Şahin, and Michael Nassen Smith for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper, as well as two anonymous referees for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 34.9% unemployment on the narrow definition, excluding discouraged work-seekers.

2 The Kurdish term “Rojava” has been superseded to be “more inclusive of non-Kurdish communities” (Dirik 2018: 158). In 2016, the region was renamed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, and in 2018 the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). While clearly an ongoing process rather than a static unit, much of its global recognition and the literature cited hereafter use “Rojava”. I will thus primarily refer to Rojava, without suggesting Kurdish hegemony.

3 Also known as the primavera estudantil, this “Student Spring” makes reference to the “Arab Spring” protests.

4 Exceptions include Dirik (2022), Bengio (2020), Dinç (2020) and a chapter in Knapp et al. (2016) for Rojava, and Goulart et al. (2019) and Platzky Miller (2019, 2021) for Brazil.

5 Although, as one South African academic wryly noted, “it’s the pinnacle of neoliberalism—the state spends nothing on the school and students have the responsibility to run it all themselves” (Mark, Interview 30 January 2017).

6 Past activist movements, like the black liberation movement, had won legislation codifying anti-racist and anti-sexist curricula (for instance in Lei 10.639 of 2003). However, implementation remained uneven and ineffective (Platzky Miller 2019: 225–26).

7 Brazilian students” engagements with local communities and parents were markedly different from the relative absence of such engagements from #FeesMustFall student activists in South Africa, perhaps because South African universities channel students towards individual self-advancement rather than community-building (see Platzky Miller 2019: 203–205).

8 Supposedly “Schools Without Parties” laws preventing political parties from indoctrinating children in schools; instead, they serve conservative ends, limiting discussions on topics including gender and sexuality, critical sociology and philosophy.

9 The Brazilian movement highlights the specific importance of student and youth politics for broader processes of social change. Although this is beyond the scope of this article, see Platzky Miller (2019: 46–48) for further discussion on student and youth politics in this context.

10 Kobanî was later reorganised as the Euphrates canton/region.

11 These principles draw on and put into practice aspects of “anarchist, feminist, and ecological thought” (STW 2015: 18), as well as histories of Marxist–Leninist resistance from regional parties. Particularly important are the works of Abdullah Öcalan (e.g. 2011; 2013), but drawing for instance from the libertarian social ecology of Murray Bookchin (1982) and ecofeminism of Maria Mies (1994); see Gerber and Brincat (2021) and Piccardi (2022) for more detailed intellectual history.

12 The situation is complex, with some concerns not directly addressed over the 2010s, including questions of sexuality and how non-binary and queer people find space within the movement (Sandal-Wilson 2020).

13 Although not always: Drwish (2017) notes that, according to one Arab teacher, the Syrian state Ministry of Education told teachers “not to go to work in schools which are subject to Kurdish control”.

14 Thus, “even European philosophy—Descartes, Plato, Nietzsche, and Marx—is on the curriculum” (Knapp, Flach and Ayboğa 2016: 182), alongside local authors and feminists including Rosa Luxemburg and Judith Butler (Biehl 2016).

15 This, too, is complicated: Bengio (2020) and Dinç (2020: 1005–06, 1009) note the nationalist slant in celebrating “Kurdish women”, the pre-eminence of Kurdish identity (albeit situated alongside e.g. Arabs, Assyrians, or Turkmen), and glorifying “sacrifice for ‘freedom’”, even amid extreme violence.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the South African NIHSS (National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences). https://www.nihss.ac.za/.