The matric pass rate may not be a good indicator of the performance of our education. However, congratulations are in order for the class of 2018. The 78,2% pass rate we managed represents an improvement over last year’s results. We like improvement!
However, our education troubles are not confined to the level of matric examination passes we attain every year.
According to senior lecturer in education, Ingrid Willenberg of Australian Catholic University, our children can hardly read and write.
This is an indication that our troubles start very early in our schooling system.
In an article published in the Mail & Guardian last year, she writes,
“South Africa ranked last out of 50 countries in the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy (PIRLS) study which tested reading comprehension of learners in their fourth year of primary schooling.
“The study found that 78% of South African pupils at this level could not read for meaning.”
However, none of these troubles is isolated.
The inability to read among our children is attached to the highly limited culture of reading culture in South African families, especially in rural areas.
This in turn is attached to the fact that usually the parents or siblings in these families are themselves not able to read well, or to read at all.
But with close to 55% of South Africans living below the poverty line, reading and sometimes education itself becomes a distant concern for many families.
According to associate professor Mary Metcalfe of the University of Johannesburg, one of our main concerns should be the fact that the main under performing provinces are rural provinces.
In an article published in the Sunday Times, she writes, “The provinces that are struggling are KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Limpopo.
“These three are critically important for the future of the country.
“They have a massive 62% of the country’s learners, and both the lowest National Senior Certificate pass rates and the highest dropout rates.
“This is where we bleed our youth.”
These three provinces are at the centre of the massive move of young, unskilled, and ill-equipped youth to the cities in pursuit of jobs and better opportunities.
Many of these youth are the ones who drop out before they even reach matric.
According to the Sunday Times, out of more than 1.1m learners who enrolled in Grade 1, just over 643,000 made it to matric.
These provinces suffer massive backlogs in infrastructure development in schools. It is the same backlog suffered by their small towns, economic hubs and rural areas.
Metcalfe also mentions a lack of supervision and support for schools in these neglected rural provinces.
It is hardly surprising that these provinces, which inherited 10 apartheid designed homelands, bore the brunt of neglect under a government which abhorred the homeland system.
To add to these troubles, which are by no means comprehensive, there is the matter of a syllabus which has been left far behind by the needs and demands of modern markets.
Our education system still happily churns out year in and year out young people shaped to fit into jobs designed in the last century, some of which are fast becoming irrelevant in a fast-changing economy.
This is in defiance of the fact that training youth for jobs does not help in the establishment of new companies and industries.
It takes too long for youth to go through the corporate ladder, amass experience before venturing out to create companies.
So, it is refreshing to note that Cyril Ramaphosa is intent on attending to our long-standing education crisis.
According to the City Press, the president is considering an overhaul of our education system, to put it in line with the latest technological advances. This is apparently in an attempt to equip our learners for the “4th industrial revolution”.
Also reported in City Press, Umalusi chairperson professor John Volmink seems to be in agreement.
This is what he reportedly said: “We have to ask the question: Is what we are doing in school enough? The answer is no. There is a general recognition that we need more; we need a radical shift.
“There is a compelling reason children, from Grade 1 to Grade 12, need to be exposed to coding and robotics. We can’t be playing catch-up with the rest of the world; we need to leapfrog them.”
Couldn’t agree more. But is there enough political will to make this happen?..