Lifelong learning as cruel optimism: Considering the discourses of lifelong learning and techno-solutionism in South African education

This article seeks to examine how two discourses –of lifelong learning and techno-solutionism – tangle with each other in South African education policy imaginaries, particularly the latter discourse as a response to an (arguably manufactured) frame of “crisis”. The author suggests that the discourse of lifelong learning constructs a relation of what Lauren Berlant terms “cruel optimism” for the marginalised majority of South Africans, sustaining a fantasy of liberatory education despite empirical evidence to the contrary. First, the prevalence of this discourse in key policy texts (predominantly education policy white papers) is examined, along with how both instrumentalist and humanist framings of lifelong learning promote and sustain this relation in spite of the ordinariness of the “attrition of the subject” (in Berlant’s terms) as a defining experience of everyday life. Next, the ubiquitous frame of crisis in education analysis in South Africa is considered, along with techno-solutionism (a term coined by Evgeny Morozov in 2013) as a popular response amongst the dominant middle-class minority. The article suggests that cruel optimism is sustained for this middle-class group through techno-solutionist education utopias, as what Berlant terms a “redefinitional strategy” for manufacturing ahistorical moments of agency in the face of persistent structural issues centuries in the making. The lens of cruel optimism is thus offered as a mechanism for denaturalising the political work of both discourses, a necessary (albeit insufficient) move towards better grasping the nature of South African education concerns, as well as theories of change that might offer genuinely emancipatory learning for all.