IT is no secret that public sector basic education in South Africa is in poor shape. In its latest Global Competitiveness Report, the World Economic Forum rates South African primary schools 132nd out of 144 countries, and 115th in access to primary school education. It has also found that the system is failing to achieve basic standards of numeracy and literacy in Grades 3 and 6.
Yet, the denial last year by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga that there is a crisis in basic education still stands.
Nationally, between 2000 and 2010, the number of public schools fell 9% while the number of independent schools rose 44%, accounting for about 5% of pupils undergoing basic education at the country’s 2,500 independent schools, according to the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa. Umalusi, the government’s quality assurance agency, says there are about 3,500 independent schools registered. The number of unregistered schools is not known.
Nonetheless, the state of education is of grave concern and it affects everyone in the country, says Ms Krystallidis. The problems originate in two areas, she says. The first is delivery of equipment, material and infrastructure and, second and most important, is the quality of teaching.
“The education system is not producing enough teachers and those teachers who enter the field are often ill prepared for their task. Teacher training should be focused much more on practical experience. Education students should be sent to more and different schools.
“Second, the poor calibre of teachers is a deep malaise. What we have is a dumbing down of teachers. Teachers must realise that they are the key to success (in basic education). They should take far greater academic responsibility.”
South Africa has a high-cost, low-performance education system that does not compare favourably with education systems in other African countries, or in similar developing economies.
There is a multitude of well-publicised problems, including a shortage of teachers, underqualified teachers and poor teacher performance. In the classroom, this results in poor learner standards and results, a lack of classroom discipline and is exacerbated by insufficient resources and inadequate infrastructure. On a government level, difficulties have been caused by a failure of appropriate inspection and monitoring, and confusion caused by changing curricula without proper communication and training. All this has lead to massive demoralisation and disillusionment among teachers and a negative and worsening perception of the teaching profession.
Recently appointed director of the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD) and former director and acting chief director for the National Department of Education Management and Governance, Martin Prew, does not beat about the bush when reviewing the challenges of the new departments of education. “We have to go back to basics,” he insists.
A close inspection of school data shows that of the 100 pupils that start grade one, 50 will drop-out before Grade 12 (most of which happens in grade 10 and 11), 40 will pass the NSC exam and 12 will qualify for university. Given that the NSC is the only externally evaluated, nationally standardised exam in the South African school system, grade progression in primary and lower-secondary school is an unreliable indicator of actual learning. Many pupils proceed to higher grades without acquiring foundational skills in numeracy and literacy. As the NSC exam approaches, schools and teachers can no longer afford to promote pupils who have not acquired the grade appropriate skills, and consequently pupils fail and drop-out of schools in large numbers in Grade 10 and 11 as schools weed out the weaker pupils. Analysis of other datasets like TIMSS verifies this, showing that Grade Nine pupils from quintile one and two schools are performing at least three years behind quintile five Grade Nine pupils.
1. Poor quality schooling at the primary and secondary level in South Africa severely limit the youth’s capacity to exploit further training opportunities. As a result, existing skills deficiencies among those who are the product of an underperforming school system (predominantly black youth) are likely to persist.
2. South Africa’s narrow youth unemployment rate of 50 per cent is staggeringly high, both in the context of far lower average global and sub-Saharan youth unemployment rates and in terms of the country’s already high aggregate narrow unemployment rate of 25 per cent.
3. The per centage of 18-24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased from about 30 per cent in 1995 to 45 per cent in 2011, while the percentage enrolled in education has decreased from 50 per cent to 36 per cent and the percentage of youths in employment remained fairly constant at between 17 per cent and 19 per cent. As such, there appears to have been a shift away from participation in education in favour of either economic inactivity or unemployment among the youth.
4. Youth unemployment in the country is not only high, but has risen precipitously since 2008, following a national trend of worsening unemployment. Moreover, the nature of unemployment experienced by the youth appears to be becoming more severe in terms of an increase in the proportion of unemployed youths that have never worked and the proportion that have been looking for work for more than a year.
5. For the youth, passing the NSC exam does not provide sufficient assurance against becomingunemployed, nor does it markedly increase one’s chances of procuring employment relative to 18-24-year-olds that have lower levels of educational attainment. Instead, the value of passing the NSC exam lies in opening up the opportunity to acquire some form of tertiary education qualification.
6. Though the unemployment rates for 18-24-year-olds with tertiary qualifications are much lower than those for youth’s with the NSC or less, they are nevertheless high in relation to South Africa’s overall unemployment rate.
7. South Africa has some of the least-knowledgeable primary school mathematics teachers in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of these maths teachers, especially those that serve poor and rural communities, have below-basic levels of content knowledge. In many instances these teachers cannot answer questions their pupils are required to answer according to the curriculum.
8.In short, poor school performance in South Africa reinforces social inequality and leads to a situation where children inherit the social station of their parents, irrespective of their motivation or ability. Until such a time as the DBE and the ruling administration are willing to seriously address the underlying issues in South African education, at whatever political or economic cost, the existing patterns of underperformance and inequality will remain unabated.
At universities, the government is now operating an increasingly stringent quota system. Medical schools, veterinary departments, legal departments, dentistry, and architecture, are operating on quotas. So for instance to be able to get into medical school, at matric Blacks require a mark above 72, coloureds (mixed race) and Indians above 78, and Whites above 92 in order to enter medical and veterinary school. And remember the additional marks are also added, so a Black could be getting into medical school with an actual mark of 62.
Other areas of higher education are not on such a strict quota system, but the pressure to reduce educational opportunities for Whites is escalating as the national democratic revolution expands.
At university, lecturers are being judged according to the number of Blacks that they manage to pass. In past 2 years, since Zuma came to power, the pressure has increased substantially so that lecturers are being forced to simply pass a number of Blacks irrespective of their actual ability. I know a number of lecturers who have resigned in disgust, and know some who continue because they simply need the money but struggle with their sense of integrity. The consequences are becoming increasingly apparent. South African doctors used to be able to work in the UK without taking any extra exams, but that is no longer true because of the deterioration in the quality of the degree.
Another anti-White policy since Zuma is the racial displacement of lecturers. Basically no White lecturer can now be added to the faculty at government universities. Those who are already working can keep their jobs, but none additional may be employed (although there is always some manipulation of the system if you have the necessary contacts). There are not sufficient SA Blacks to fill the posts. The response of the recruiters is to seek lecturers from places like India, whom they regard favourably but are expensive, or from African countries such as Nigeria whom they view as basically lazy and incompetent but they have no choice over. Any Black from the rest of Africa is favoured over a White South African. Because the management of universities is also being racially cleansed, the level of incompetence is increasing by orders of magnitude. The mood of pessimism and cynicism amongst lecturers for all except the most liberal is extreme. Universities are giving professional counseling to provide some recompense for the situation.
Similar racial displacement (transformation) rules are now prevalent in private industry, government, and para-statal organisations (Quangos for the British) also as the government pursues its national democratic revolution (Black fascism?) . The racial cleansing of departments means that, even if competent people are employed as consultants, the ability for the organization to learn and improve is being lost. There is not an understanding that in destroying the system you are destroying the prospects for all.
The consequence will be that in a generation, South Africa will go into a terminal decline without the ability to revive itself
Hofmeester, who is also the vice-president of Sadtu, said according to reports, 22% of pupils in South Africa had been threatened with violence, assaulted, robbed or sexually assaulted at school.
She said deploying police was a short-term solution as contributing factors went beyond just the school gates. Principals needed to be able to deal with societal issues in the communities they worked in.
The National School Violence study revealed that learners were perpetrators of 90% of the violence that happens in schools, whether against other learners or teachers,” she said.
Apartheid’s “Bantu Education” was Better than Now, Says Leading South African Black Academic
Rabelani Dagada, author, Development Economist, Information Technologist and Knowledge Management Specialist based at the Business School of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, shocked attendees at a recent debate on the anti-white racism code-named “affirmative action” by telling them that the education currently provided by the black government had deteriorated to the worst in Africa.
“It (Apartheid education) was far better in terms of quality than the education that our kids are receiving nowadays,” Dagada said. “After 20 years of democracy, the education levels have plunged. It’s worse than the so-called Bantu education.”
Dagada’s comments echo a 2010 report by Britain’s BBC reporter Hugh Sykes, who found a large number of blacks living in shanty-towns in South Africa who also complained that “Some things were better under apartheid.”
Dagada, who has achieved all sorts of awards and honors, has good reason to be pessimistic.
Of the 1.1 million black children who were born in 1994 and later entered first grade, fewer than half made it far enough to take the final school graduation exam.
Of those who did, the percentage who passed was 73.9%, up from 70.2% in 2012. But this figure hides the fact that the passing levels are little short of moronic.
Students in South Africa must pass six to earn their diploma, called a National Senior Certificate. However, in order to pass, they need only to receive scores of 40% on three exams and 30% on three others.
“I find it hard to get excited over … results,” tweeted the editor of South Africa’s Financial Mail magazine, Barney Mthombothi. “As long as pass mark is 30% … we’re fooling nobody but ourselves.”
As the far leftist Mail and Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg commented: “The measure of a successful education is whether students are leaving school both literate and numerate, and are able to learn new skills as they enter the work force, or learn new concepts once they enter higher education. It’s doubtful whether a student with a 35% average would be successful on any of those counts.”
The Mail and Guardian went on to explain that even these poor results had been artificially boosted with what is known in South Africa as “mark adjustments.”
This practice of “mark adjustments” works like this, according to the Mail and Guardian: “Each year the state’s quality assurance body Umalusi analyses the results to ensure they are kept in line with the previous year’s performances. If needed, the raw marks are adjusted to remove inconsistencies that might creep in during the examination process or due to external factors.”
Recently, it was reported that only 5% of black and colored students who enter higher education (university level in South Africa) complete their studies.
The collapse in South African educational standards was dramatically revealed in what was described as a “candid affidavit” by the head of the Eastern Cape education department filed in court in response to a legal case.
According to the affidavit, made by head of department Mthunywa Ngonzo, his department is an utter failure, with no decision-making capability, poor leadership and no financial controls.
He said that it was this sorry state that prohibited the department from filling thousands of vacant posts for teachers.
Other admissions by Ngonzo include:
* “The department has been characterised by challenged leadership and governance for the past 16 years, with 13 heads of department, six MECs [political chiefs] and multiple chief financial officers”;
* There are poor or nonexistent financial controls;
* “The department has never had appropriate or fully functional decision-making structures”;
* It lacks information on how many teachers it employs and what their qualifications are; and
* The province has one head office and 23 district offices, 13 of which are dysfunctional.
The chaos is not limited to that province. Last year, more than 5000 school textbooks were found dumped in Majeje, in the Phalaborwa region. Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Ronel Otto said the books were dumped in an open veld and were in a good condition.
“The between 5,000 to 6,000 books range from Grade 0 to Grade 9 for various subjects,” Otto said.
Some grades in Limpopo received textbooks seven months after the school year started, while others were still waiting.
The real reason for the collapse in education is of course, racial. According to all objective tests, the average IQ in South Africa is 66 for blacks, 83 for Indians, 82 for “Coloreds” (mixed race) and 94 for whites.