This past week I spoke at an event called “The Real State of the Nation” ahead of what most South Africans know will be a spectacle of feathers at the official Sona on February 9.
I half expect to see TV presenter Anele Mdoda alongside the red-carpet, shouting at the political peacocks: “What are you wearing?”
Many South Africans now accept that the president will dish up the usual menu of fabrications and platitudes. None more so than we in education.
What is the real state of the nation in the 30th year since the legal end of apartheid?
The Centre for Risk Analysis recently composed a deft summary of where we are. The real matric pass rate is closer to 54% (not 80.1%) when you calculate that of the 1,074,788 children who started in grade 2 in 2012, only 580,555 passed the senior certificate exam in 2022.
But this gross wastage of human potential does not bother this government at all, provided we swallow the annual deception around pass rates. Fewer than 40% of those who made it to grade 12 passed well enough to pursue higher education even though you could get a so-called Bachelor's pass with 50% in four subjects and 30% in two other subjects. That is the real state of the nation in education.
The Sonas do not engage with the realities at all.
This gross wastage of human potential does not bother this government at all, provided we swallow the annual deception around pass rates
The 2021 address carried statements such as: “The investments we make now in ECD (early childhood development) and early school learning will yield great economic benefits in the next two decades.” The country’s leading ECD expert, Prof Eric Atmore, gives the real state of those investments: “We have seen absolutely no budgetary provisions or expenditure increase for early childhood education. The only change has been the shift of ECD from the department of social development to basic education.”
Another statement was: “We said that every 10-year-old needs to be able to read for meaning.” That’s nice but it's still not happening, according to recent research.
Or: “We have seen the impact [joint scholarships] can have with the Nelson Mandela Fidel Castro Medical Training Programme in Cuba.” Really? Then why are these students’ qualifications not fully accepted by South African medical schools and why are the students retrained in key competency areas?
And then, from the president who promised us bullet trains: “tablets are under way to school students” and “coding and robotics in grades R to 3 [will be] implemented fully by 2022”. Go to a township near you and see the reality with respect to these promises of new learning technologies.
For the past 30 years, this government has consistently hoodwinked the public into thinking that radical change has happened in education.
The only invention that came anything close to fundamental reform was outcomes-based education, which was abandoned when the government realised that it had devastated teaching and learning across state schools.
OBE, history will show, did even more damage to learning outcomes than the pandemic, and that alone tells you why public education is under water.
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