The state of our education- a new perspective

EDITOR – This is probably the best time in the New Year to review the state of the South African Basic and Higher Education Industry.

One of the primary elements when evaluating the health of a country is to look at the state of, inter alia, education, labour relations, health care, freedom of religion, association and expression. In the case of South Africa all these rights are entrenched and constitutionalised and has formed the backbone of post-apartheid South Africa.

The matriculation results is often viewed as the pride of the nation as its the culmination of ones’ basic education and provides a sense of the health of the educational system. We are all by now familiar with all the statistics about the pass rate and how many students have attained Bachelor passes and so forth but there is a need to dissect all this information and analyse it to establish whether it is meaningful.

On the face of it a pass rate of 72,5% is a laudable achievement given the circumstances of political instability in the townships and the lack of learning material. Is this pass rate a true reflection of the performance of the department of basic education – we then need to look at information that has not been published to make judgement.

Of the 2016 matric cohort when they commenced schooling 12 years ago there were 1.1million but only 662,612 sat for the matriculation examinations in 2016 and 442,672 passed. If these numbers are contextualised in terms of thru-put-rate and the real calculus is done then the pass rate for that cohort who started 12 years before is just 40,24%. This gets even worse – of the 1,100,877 who enrolled for grade 10 in 2014 only 610,178 wrote the grade 12 examinations in 2016. This is the information that is not published as this would spoil the intended positive picture. This could even get worse if one takes into account the progressed learners, are those who failed grade 11 twice and had to be pushed/progressed into grade 12.

The tragedy of this misleading information that is fed to us is that it may make the Government look good but what does it do to those students, who have been forced-fed through the system by way of a statistical formula of giving – which is a method of increasing the marks so as to achieve a desired result. A student with an aggregate of 55% could end up with an aggregate of 65% as a result of the principle of giving. This gives one a false sense of worth and this ends in disaster when the students lands up at university where there’s no “progressing” formula.

It all goes back to the old adage” you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time. The sad reality will creep upon us in the next few weeks when many of those who earned a bachelors pass fail to gain access to universities because of a lack of space – the capacity of all institutions of higher learning (ie. universities, university of technology’s and technical colleges) would only absorb 20% of the 162,364 bachelor passes, 179,619 diploma passes and 100,486 certificate passes. The Sunday Times in its report on this subject dated 02/02/15 concluded that only 1 in 8 students will find a place at university.

This begs the question as to what happens to those 80%, who have been excluded by default – this reflects a distortion of the facts and a disconnection between the Basic Education Ministry and the Higher Education Ministry and the propaganda machinery of government.

SICARIO

Durban