SA education gets an 'F'

By Deon de Lange and Xolani Mbanjwa

Education, at school and university level is in a mess. An alarming report has revealed that most of South Africa's public schools are dysfunctional and the education system is failing to produce the skills required for job creation and poverty reduction.

Presenting the latest country report in Cape Town last week, SA Institute for Race Relations (SAIRR) chief executive John Kane-Berman claimed that up to 80 percent of the country's public schools are dysfunctional despite a decade of incremental increases in public spending on the education system.

He pointed out that the proportion of African public school matriculants who pass the Senior Certificate Examination (SCE) with a university entrance has declined steadily from 13 percent in 1994 to 10,9 percent in 2007. The national public school average of 15 percent last year is also down 3 percent from 1994.

"After fourteen years of so-called equal education, the government has produced less. We have a major problem in our schools," he said.

By tracking the 2005 group of grade 10s over time, the report shows that only slightly more than half of these pupils wrote the SCE two years later and only 34,4 percent of the original group passed grade 12.

Less than 8 percent of the original group qualified to attend university and only 2,4 percent of them passed mathematics at higher grade.

In contrast, 79 percent of the 7 362 private school pupils who wrote the Independent Examination Board SCE last year qualified for university.

The picture looks equally bleak at tertiary level. The university class that enrolled in 2000 about 120 000 students was cut by 30 percent when 36 000 first-year students quit at the end of 2000.

Another 13 200 (11 percent) quit at the end of 2001, followed by 10 800 (9 percent) at the end of 2002. By the end of 2003, only 26 400 (22 percent) of the original class of 2000 had graduated and a further 33 500 (28 percent) were still studying.

Last night, in his address to the ANC Youth League at their Bloemfontein conference, ANC Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe bemoaned the "bad" state of education in the country.

He said: "Our education is in a bad state, a bad state. We have immediate tasks that we ought to do to advance education for our people. We see a lot of challenges in the area of academic life of students."

Motlanthe criticised students at tertiary institutions for burning buildings and vandalising property that they need to advance their education saying they "have, at times, not shown the level of understanding that is required in dealing with the challenges that they face in these institutions".

In his presentation, Kane-Berman suggested one way to improve the state of public schooling was to take the lessons learned from the 20 best performing public schools the so-called "centres of excellence in public education".

He also proposed that pupils be taught in their mother tongue, that "bureaucratic foul-ups" such as missing text books be addressed, that discipline be restored by allowing teachers to act against unruly pupils and that school governing bodies be given the power to hire and fire teachers.

Kane-Berman noted that a recent international study comparing the reading skills of 4th graders in 40 countries placed South Africa last, behind Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar and Indonesia.

• This article was originally published on page 1 of The Daily News on April 07, 2008