ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to provide a South African context for the Western Cape study. It seeks to identify the specific material/demographic/social base on which school and youth resistance politics is constructed — and in doing so draws upon some of the theoretical and comparative data visited earlier. There are several theoretical explanations of radicalism in 'youth polities'. They stemmed initially from Mannheim's characterisation of generations in sociological rather than in merely biological or chronological terms; and were greatly stimulated by attempts to explain student revolt in advanced capitalist societies in the 1960s. The political education of school or college students is often spectacularly rapid. Student opposition surfaced in 1956, but was stepped up in the mid-1960s. Students found larger numbers of teachers and principals supporting them: a tendency which found organisational expression in the formation of WECTU.
