Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga recently told a group of students that with better education there would be less rape in South Africa. This stoked a furious backlash that does little to address South Africa’s shame, which the latest matric results highlight once again.
Minister Motshekga said to a group of school students on video that ‘an educated man won’t rape’. To contextualize this she then said, ‘[m]y theory is that the more educated you are, the more sophisticated you are, the less you get involved in wrong things because you can look after yourself, you can look after your family, you can look after your environment’.
This is an exemplary, simple distillation of the wisdom of millennia. First, it is empirically true that higher education is internationally and cross-temporally correlated with lower crime rates. As a standard academic description, ‘there is overwhelming consensus‘ that higher education lowers crime. This South African study drives home the point.
This study, published in 2015, showed that the proportion of people in South Africa who had completed primary school accounted for only 23% of the national population but 31% of the prison inmate population. Those with incomplete secondary education made up 39% of the population but 45% of the inmate population, while those with matric or higher education were 28% of the population but only 13% of the inmate population.
Moreover, the study made a distinction between ‘economic crime’ like robbery and ‘contact crime’ like rape and homicide, from a smaller sample in the Free State. It found ‘contact crimes are more likely than economic crimes among…people with low levels of education’.
Because of the small sample size of the Free State, the study warns against extrapolating too confidently from this particular finding, but its overall national finding that education and crime are inversely related is standard and extremely reliable.
Second, Motshekga’s reasoning for why this is the case is sound. The best explanation for why higher education lowers crime is that it empowers the qualified to maximize their interests in conventional value-added ways. Put sentimentally, and the sentiment matters profoundly, if you earn enough to build a family then you are less likely to fall from grace through bouts of sadistic violence.
Third, Motshekga’s generic claim, ‘an educated man won’t rape’, potentially adds a further dimension. ‘Education’ in the sense that statistically correlates with less crime is of the formal literacy and numeracy kind. However, since ancient times there has always been a distinct concept of ‘moral education’, which is different from schooling. It is generally true that a morally educated man will not rape.
So, Motshekga said two important things. In the backbone moral sense, if you rape someone you are not an educated man. Second, if you get decent schooling, you up the odds of avoiding a life of crime. In sum, we need to improve education, moral and material.
So seldom in the last three years has a Minister made such telling points that this would almost be newsworthy in the absence of all else. But the hook is what came next.
The Minister was jeered by the students she was talking to. New Frame, a trendy online newspaper, joined the children’s backlash by issuing an editorial that damned Motshekga for ‘speech acts that participate in and inform, speak to and perpetuate rape culture’. A Mail & Guardian journalist said her speech was ‘reckless and deeply problematic‘. NGOs and academics condemned her. TimesLive denounced the Minister as Mampara of the Week. The deputy leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters said she must ‘shut up!‘
What could be wrong with the Basic Education Minister promoting the peaceful knock-on effects of better education? Nothing to do with facts. Not one of her critics attempted to debunk Motshekga’s claim that higher education correlates with lower crime, empirically, for the simple reason that this is impossible.
Promoting Basic Education is ‘Classist’
TimesLive said that the Minister ‘implied that all uneducated people were potential rapists’, which, given the context the Minister supplied in speech under her probabilistic ‘theory’ of what leads to ‘less…wrong things’ is simply untrue.
Mbuyiselo Botha, a commissioner at the Commission for Gender Equality, said ‘her statement fits into the patriarchal thinking that good men don’t rape’.
The Centre for Applied Legal studies said the speech was ‘misleading’ and ‘harmful’ for ‘suggesting that only ‘uneducated’ people commit these kinds of offences’ which, again, she never did.
The Mail & Guardian asked: ‘What must a learner say or do after being raped by an ‘educated’ man? Do they report the crime or keep it to themselves, because it was done by someone who, according to the minister, is not capable of doing such a thing.’ Again, the minister never said that.
New Frame took it even further. The ‘legacy of sexual violence in South Africa’, it said, is ‘rooted in slavery (which) centrally and foundationally forms the capitalist society we live in today, fashioning our ideas of race…as well as who is “rapeable” and the kinds of “men who rape”.’
‘Motshekga’s words’, New Frame expanded in this context, ‘contain a deeply rooted classicism that creates the idea of rapists, in ways that slavery did. It does so by connecting labour, a lack of education, and material accumulation to conjure the idea of who is a rapist.’
New Frame also claimed that Motshekga was wrong to use words like ‘sophisticated’ and ‘civilized’ since they form ‘part of a range of movements and acts through which rape culture’s existence is licensed and given life and vitality daily’. Motshekga’s approval of education is ‘both authorized by rape culture and authorize it further’.
Battle of Ideas – Education and Rape
If you want to know what IRR CEO Frans Cronje means when he talks about the ‘Battle of Ideas’ look and learn from this case.
On the ground we have disaster. SAPS recorded 115 rapes per day last year.
Under the African National Congress (ANC) and its teachers’ union ally, the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, South Africa’s education system has declined to the point where even The Economist, which endorsed Cyril Ramaphosa for President in 2019, called public education here the ‘world’s worst’ on a bang-for-buck basis.
In 2010 there were over 1 million Grade Two students enrolled in public schools that should have matriculated in 2020. But in 2020 only 233 000 sat a matric exam for mathematics and only 125 000 of them passed, a pass being 30% or higher.
It is inhuman what children are subjected to under the false name of ‘education’ in this country.
This time last year over ‘two-thirds of young South Africans [were] not in employment, education or training within 12 months of leaving school’.
Yet the Mail & Guardian reports matric results under the headline, ‘Class of 2020 produces ‘quality passes’ – Motshekga‘ with no context offered to their readers about the drop-out rate. TimesLive published two enthusiastic pieces on these results as well.
When the Minister of Basic Education acknowledged quite simply that the crises of poor education and shocking crime are connected, what should happen is the following: journalists and pundits should respond by saying, ‘Well done, Minister. Now what are we going to do about improving schools?’
The IRR’s chief and long-standing recommendation is to give more power to parents to decide how and where their children are educated by means of education vouchers, but there are others. The IRR also has basic, practical reform proposals to improve policing, including the democratic election of station commanders.
Instead of any headlines on policy reform or debate, the only ones Motshekga is likely to see after making a speech about the virtues of education accuse her of ignorance or ‘authorizing rape’ on the one hand, while cooing at the ‘quality’ matric results on the other.
These headlines are coming from parts of the journalist class who desperately want to reduce the ghastly rate at which people, women and children especially, are brutalized. But some think this would be best achieved by pretending there is no connection between a broken public school system and blood on the streets, so as not to offend the ‘impoverished and working classes’.
Missing Link
Statistical facts and the policy debates they should inform are easy for Classical Liberals to confront because we have a separate and stable concept of personal agency. No matter how impoverished and uneducated you are, you are fully responsible if you rape, and no one else of the same class should be judged blameworthy for your individual actions.
Confronted by allegations of ‘classism’ when reflecting on data, we might say: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, statistics are one thing, but you should never judge an individual’s moral character by the dumb groups like class or race to which they belong.’
But could members of Ramaphosa’s cabinet say that? The concept of individuality is irreconcilable with Ramaphosa’s BEE-forever attitude and his signature policy to confiscate property for ‘our people’.
By Ramaphosa’s logic, the fact that the average black person is poorer than the average white person should make you think of all black people as ‘disadvantaged’, individuality be damned. This is the key principle of group esteem politics; its proponents insist that you must judge people by their group. Tell such a person that there is an inverse statistical relationship between education and crime and they do what all the media has done, namely, to infer that all uneducated people are rapists.
Moreover, this madness is compounded by the ANC Umrabulo discussion document which claims that crime is a product of too much capitalism. On this the ANC and New Frame agree, reality is another matter.
The political point is that Motshekga’s boss, her party, and the media response all push against talking about the connection between education and crime. Remember also that the Minister’s ‘mampara’ stonking is just a moment in the barrage, repeated daily, in what is technically known as ‘South African journalism’, of common sense.
The upshot is that practical proposals to improve education, both for its own sake and to make a real difference to crime down the line, are absent while journalists screech ‘classist’ at the Basic Education Minister because she promoted education. Will education policy reform emerge from this? No.
That is why the Battle of Ideas matters. It is what determines the direction of pressure applied on those who hold power to change national outcomes. We are not winning the battle of ideas, which is another way of saying the country is not getting politically ‘educated’. Yet, we will not give up.
There are children in schools without real teachers or toilets still fighting to learn how to divide eighteen by three. Our job is just to remind nominally ‘educated’ elites what happens when you add two and two.
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Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay