“The Teachers Just Consume Our Money”: Casting Blame for Educational Failure in Rural Lesotho

Abstract

1. Introduction. Formal schooling is widely perceived to play a key role in children and young people’s lives and is linked with ideas of progress and empowerment (Henry 2020). Yet it is increasingly apparent that schooling often fails to deliver what it promises and is associated with broken dreams and experiences of failure (Dyson 2019; Stambach and Hall 2017). Increased access to schooling has happened at a time when opportunities to benefit from social and economic mobility have crumbled, particularly for those growing up in rural settings in the Global South (Jeffrey 2008; Camfield 2011; Körling 2019). There are a multitude of structural factors that help explain the failure of education to deliver its promised benefits (Ansell et al. 2020), but these often remain hidden from those experiencing schooling and even from those responsible for its implementation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in two Lesotho villages with parents, educators, and community leaders, as well as interviews and workshops with the policy community working within the field of education, this chapter shows how teachers have become embroiled symbolically in the narrative of educational failure. ...