Rethinking schooling for development in wageless times

ABSTRACT

In development discourse, schools are charged with readying the labor force for imminent job creation, which will lead to full employment. However, I argue that policy goals which aim toward full-employment are inherently inadequate given trends in the global political economy. A contradiction emerges: schools are deployed to ready a labor force for jobs which may never arrive. Using the case of Namibia, I present an immanent critique of official documents to demonstrate how states root development dreams in schooling and skills enhancement. This is at the expense of redistributive agendas which could respond to the new normal of joblessness.

KEYWORDS:

• Schooling
• jobs
• productivist discourse
• development
• capitalism
• Namibia
• education

Acknowledgments

Mary Mostafanezhad and Hannah Tavares provide consistently good advice. A previous version was presented at the 2019 American Association of Geographers meeting, where it was discussed by William Monteith. Joseph Tanke and Alex Means provided important feedback during a presentation for the Hawaii International Cultural Studies speaker series. I have also greatly appreciated conversing with Lucy Edwards-Jauch on the topics reviewed here and Mutaleni Amutoko keeps the anti-wage fire burning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ferguson is not carelessly gendering. Most development programs (Ferguson is looking at cash transfers) are currently aimed at ‘vulnerable populations’ including women, which legitimizes and traps the man as worker.

2. We should be skeptical of Namibian employment statistics, as ‘employed’ does not always correlate with popular understandings of jobs. Namibia Statistics Agency understands, ‘employed persons [to] include those persons of working age who worked for at least one hour during the [seven-day reference period ahead of the interview] as contributing family workers (formerly referred to as unpaid family workers) working in a family business’ (NSA, 2017, 25 my emphasis; see also Jauch & Tjirera, 2017, P. 164).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Henry

Jacob Henry is a human geographer studying the cultural politics post-wage livelihoods in Northern Namibia.