Rural life at home and in the village: an ethnographic exploration of the everyday meaning of education negotiated through household dynamics and school walking routes in rural KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract

School and education for a significant number of South African learners is characterized by long travel times, unsafe modes of travel and exposure to weather related dangers. This dissertation was conducted with six participants in a rural municipality in KwaZulu-Natal and aims to highlight the value that rural learners place on education by looking at their everyday households and their walking routes to school. The lived experiences narrated during the interviews and observed during participant observation allowed me to capture the participant’s everyday, fears and coping strategies. The findings show that there are contextual factors that are barriers to education. Since my focus is the home and the walking routes, I was interested in the unique arrangements that the household, village and learners make in order to access school in rural areas. I was also interested in the participants’ outlook, worldview and habitus and how this triad impacts on the meaning they attach to education. After an examination of the history of KZN, a look at the socio-historical background and the view of rurality as the periphery, it became clear that the use of an orthodox measurement of school performance to understand the success or failure of schools in this context is deeply insufficient. And so the motivation behind an ethnographic design was to capture the experiences, interpretations and meanings the rural learners gave to education in their context. This is because beyond the gates of the schools are households and villages that add to the complexity of education in rural areas.