Workers' Education in the Global South: radical adult education at the crossroads by Linda Cooper (review)

Abstract

Workers’ Education in the Global South: radical adult education at the crossroads is a remarkable intervention – both in contemporary educational debates and as an approach to understanding the early strengths and later failures of the formalisation of worker education in post-apartheid South Africa. Cooper provides a lucid analysis and a carefully argued and insightful account of the nature of and changes in worker education over the last 50 years in South Africa. Her definition of worker education is wide-ranging, including both more formal worker education projects as well as its occurrences in everyday organisational practice. She draws amongst others on research conducted with the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) and Urban Training Project (UTP) in the 1980s, the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) in the 2000s and the Natal Workers College in the 2010s. The book provides a sustained critique of one of the most influential approaches to develop within South African sociology of education over the last two decades. Central to this approach, built around the work of Basil Bernstein, has firstly been the notion of the importance of ‘powerful knowledge’; and, secondly, distinctions between various kinds of knowledge, such as between abstract and everyday knowledge, conceptual and relevant knowledge, high and low status knowledge, formal and informal knowledge, codified and experiential knowledge, systematised and commonsense knowledge. In this view, ‘powerful knowledge’ is formal, abstract and conceptual ‘school knowledge’ rather than everyday and experiential, informal knowledge. Cooper draws from a wealth of conceptual and historical resources to rescue worker education traditions from the condescension of