The Politics and Limits of Aspiration

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Black youth experiences at a progressive low-fee private school in a postapartheid city illuminate the politics and limits of aspiration.

On January 15, two days before the start of the 2024 school year, I joined 50 grade eight students and their guardians for an orientation at Launch, a high school in one of Cape Town’s oldest townships. Townships are peri-urban areas designated for black inhabitation by colonial and apartheid laws that largely remain marginalized despite South Africa’s 1994 democratic transition. Founded in 2004, Launch is a network of eight low-fee private schools serving grades eight through twelve across four of South Africa’s nine provinces. Their mission is to “transform the educational aspirations and economic realities” of township communities by preparing youth for first-generation higher education and social mobility. My ethnographic research at Launch revealed the complex spatial and affective politics of black youth aspiration in a postapartheid city. In addition to academic requirements like high-level mathematics and science courses (required for many tertiary tracks but not always available or required at township schools), Launch accomplishes its mission through unique pedagogies intended to expand students’ aspirations and propel them toward “fulfilling futures.” When we filed into the school’s lecture hall at the beginning of the year, grade twelve student leaders explained these approaches to grade eight students and their families. 

First, Sinovuyo described Launch’s distinct approach to life orientation (LO), a compulsory subject added to the national curriculum during the transition from apartheid that focuses on the study of self and society through lessons on personal and social development, civics and human rights, health, and career readiness. Unlike other schools, Launch’s LO curriculum includes regular, group-therapy-style discussion circles where students and staff practice mindfulness techniques like breath work and engage in open-ended dialogue to process personal and community issues. She explained, “We all have emotional needs, children as well. Emotional ‘baggage,’ including troubles at home, can weigh on us, preventing us from reaching our dreams. We come together as a class to breathe and to talk about issues.” Life orientation circles are described in the manual as the school’s “most fundamental intervention strategy,” intended to unblock trauma and unlock aspiration by fostering emotional awareness, expression, regulation, and resilience. 

Next, Siviwe described another unique Launch component: outings, the first of which would be a student tour of Cape Town. “On the first day of school the grade eights will tour the city, places in town like Signal Hill, Table Mountain, and Camps Bay. We want them to learn how to claim space, because we grew up in Cape Town, but we don’t really know Cape Town.” Adults in the audience responded with knowing and affirming sounds, signaling their recognition of the persistent apartheid geography that maintains racialized access to spaces and opportunities in their city. Launch uses this first day of school trip and a series of other outings both within and beyond the township as what I call “spatial pedagogy.” By facilitating transgression of entrenched spatial boundaries in a city where racist urban planning constrains mobility, they aim to stretch youth aspirations beyond township enclosures.

A single file line of grade 8 students walk uphill on a two-lane road on Cape Town’s Signal Hill. On the left, a tall tree hovers over the road. In the distance in front of students is the peak of Lion’s Head mountain. As students walk, they are gazing to the right at an expansive view of the blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Credit: Amelia Simone Herbert

Grade 8 students climbing Signal Hill for scenic views of Cape Town during their tour of the city on the first day of school.

Politics and Pedagogies of Aspiration

Launch frames its trauma-informed approach to life orientation and its spatial pedagogy of outings as means to enhance black youth aspiration. In my work, I interrogate this emphasis on what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai called “the capacity to aspire,” people’s capacity to navigate unequal social terrain toward lives beyond poverty. Ethnographers of education have drawn on this concept to explore how youth and families in diverse global settings approach schooling as a project of future-making amidst disparate conditions of possibility. While the capacity to aspire is often portrayed in neutral terms as a sort of virtuous striving, what Appadurai calls “an ethics of possibility,” educational anthropologists like Elsa Davidson and Leya Mathew emphasize that aspiration is also a contested political practice. The quest to fashion “fulfilling futures” is shaped by past deprivations and present precarities. Some aspirations are valorized, while others are not. And educational discourses of aspiration are often deployed in ways that rehash meritocratic notions of individual responsibility and talent, deflecting from structural inequality. 

As states forgo redistributive policy and embrace marketized economies that commodify education as the morally legitimized means of social mobility, scholars in anthropology and education have turned critical attention to pedagogies of aspiration. These have intensified in formal schooling, emphasizing lessons in individual empowerment and enterprise, and teaching self-improvement as the most appropriate path to futures beyond precarity. In South Africa, this is evident in a rapidly growing sector of “affordable” private schools that claim to level uneven terrain and interrupt poverty by fostering aspiring, upwardly mobile youth from township communities. These schools often frame their efforts in social justice terms. For example, Launch’s manual states that “encouraging high aspirations in all our students” is meant to “reverse the social engineering of apartheid.”  Yet, emphasizing young people’s capacity to aspire can also aid neoliberal governance by forging “aspiration nations” of hard-working, burdened youth with individualist imaginings of the future and obscured consciousness of the sources of inequality or collective power in addressing them. This burden falls most heavily on youth who are marginalized by racial and class oppression. Meditating on aspiration’s etymological roots as a kind of breath work (literally “to breathe toward”), Christina Sharpe has argued that for black youth navigating the constricting atmospheres left in the wake of enslavement, imperialisms/colonialisms, apartheid, structural adjustments, forced migrations, and more, the labor of aspiring is both “violent and life-saving.” This contradiction resonates in the South African context, where the apartheid-era pedagogy of domination that limited black aspiration to create a laboring class has been eradicated, but the celebrated “doors of learning” have now opened to a competitive, racialized marketplace of schools.

Aspiration at Launch

I first learned of Launch during my days as a high school teacher when Launch’s Capetonian principal visited my Newark, New Jersey classroom during an educator fellowship where he was learning about US charter schools. This visit sparked questions about Launch’s unique model, about the broader context of South African education, and about transnational trends in market-based education reform. I eventually explored these during 21 months of ethnographic research between 2014 and 2019 at Launch and in Cape Town interrogating how students, alumni, families, and educators navigate the politics of aspiration in an antiblack city and marketized schooling landscape. My findings offer two interventions to scholarship on the politics and pedagogies of aspiration. 

First, while scholars have explored the temporal politics of aspiration as a striving toward futures, I argue that aspiration is also a spatial imaginary projecting marginalized youth into contested places, especially in cities where histories of racist urban planning and ongoing uneven development maintain racialized geographies. At Launch, I learned that the spatial pedagogy of outings is intended to expand aspiration by activating black youth desire to transform township spaces and encouraging them to “claim space” in Cape Town areas historically deemed and still understood as “white.” As one alumnus told me of his schooling experience at Launch, “It had an impact on how I viewed the city because the city is very, very different in different parts.”

Second, the affective labor of aspiring is both life-saving and violent for black youth navigating the inequality and antiblackness inherent to racial capitalism. While Launch’s life orientation circles are meant to increase students’ capacity to aspire by addressing trauma, they do not interrogate the structural roots of widespread continuous traumatic stress in poor communities. Students repeatedly shared that a major impact of LO circles was the diffusion of shame upon learning that their “classmates could relate” to their traumatic experiences, but some also questioned the lack of classroom opportunities to critically examine the social and economic conditions that make these experiences so common. One alumna who grew up in a former hostel designed for black laborers told me that her university experience, which Launch enabled her to access, also made her realize that Launch left her “oblivious about politics and the brutal history endured by black people,” including the history of her very own housing. She expressed that this knowledge would have helped her and her peers better contextualize their shared conditions rather than internalize their trajectories as solely matters of individual effort. 

A life orientation circle being held outside at a Launch school.

Credit: Amelia Simone Herbert

A group of students and their teacher sit on black plastic chairs in a circle on a dirt field. They are participating in a discussion. Their school building can be seen in the background as well as several green water storage tanks.

The Limits of Aspiration in Advancing Educational Justice

My research reveals that investments in liberal individualist notions of aspiration compromise the liberatory aims of progressive pedagogies by obscuring youth consciousness of the historical and ongoing political construction of inequality that shapes the social terrain on which they aspire. As critical education scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Arathi Sriprakash have argued, framing disparities as the result of variations in aspiration denies the role of structural forces like racism and class dispossession in creating disparity. Furthermore, it distracts from leveraging education as a tool to conscientize people of these forces and generate collective action against them. Anthropologist Savannah Shange has also shown how liberal individualism perpetuates antiblack racism even in antiracist schools. While Launch students attested to the profound impacts of life orientation circles and school outings, several highlighted the limits of aspiration as a framework for educational justice by contrasting Launch with their participation in activist spaces beyond school. These spaces exposed them to conscientizing education aimed instead at developing what I call a “capacity to conspire” toward collective change.

While senior students were leading Launch’s orientation session at the start of the school year, teachers at Launch schools around the country were preparing their classrooms for the first day. Several of these teachers were alumni, including Mpumelelo. When we met in 2014, he was a confident grade twelve student who saw his Launch education as “a ticket” to a life beyond the township. Shortly after matriculating, he reflected, “The reason I went to Launch was the same reason for a lot of the kids. The school was seen as this place where children are shaped to become something else that does not conform to, you know, ‘township standards’ and that will take them on a better path.” Yet, ten years later, he was back in the township preparing for the first day of school. In that time, he had earned bachelor’s, honors, and master’s degrees from the top three universities in the country. He had studied politics, but, as a student who started university in 2015, his most powerful political lessons—those that would lead him to scrutinize Launch’s focus on individual aspiration as a theory of social change—had been delivered outside of the classroom in the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall university protests. Mpumelelo and his “born free” peers, the first generation of South Africans born free of the apartheid education system that legally constricted their parents’ aspirations, took aim at the myth that the liberal capitalist terms of their country’s transition have opened all doors to those who simply aspire and work hard. Mpumelelo’s university experience made him consider “the race question and the class question,” leading him to believe that Launch’s focus on aspiration neglects to help youth understand “the triple helix of poverty, unemployment, and inequality… the interconnectedness of the issues South Africa faces as a country holistically.” Driven by this critique, he returned to Launch as a history teacher with aims to help “decolonize classrooms.” By facilitating critical engagement with South Africa’s history and contemporary politics Mpumelelo hopes to activate a new aspiration for Launch students: “transforming power dynamics in South Africa.”

Tricia Niesz is the section contributing editor for the Council on Anthropology and Education.