When you travel in Africa; it is not uncommon to see neat children sitting under a tree intently listening to their teacher. They often do not have any class rooms, have walked miles to get there and cherish the few books they have. They are so keen to be educated because they know that it is the best path to better their lives. Contrast that to the Western world, particularly the United Kingdom where teachers battle to get the attention of pupils as they are not allowed to discipline; there are many kids with all the opportunities who just lack the will to study. So, if the kids are not the problem, what is wrong with our education system? The spending on education by the apartheid government was the reason why non-white education was so far behind in 1994. But that is no longer the case; our spending on education rivals OECD-countries and most other countries in Africa; we are right up there with the big spenders. And still we are bottom, or near-bottom on the list of literacy in the world. So, what is the problem? The Economist lays the blame squarely at the feet of teachers or more particularly the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) and says it is high time that Ramaphosa does something about it. – Linda van Tilburg
By Thulasizwe Sithole
The Economist correspondent visited the Hlabizulu Primary school near Willowvale in the Eastern Cape and found that only three of the seven teachers at the school had turned up for work on the day. There were children playing on the playground without supervision even though it was not break, while another group had been padlocked inside a class room.
The paper (even though it looks like a magazine, it has always insisted it is a newspaper) admits that “locking up children may be unusual”; but what they found at the Hlabizulu school however reflected what happened regularly at schools in South Africa. Mkhuseli Ngcube from a non-government organisation Public School Partnership told them that “very little education is taking place here”, that it happened even in cases where teachers did show up.
The present state of educations reflected the inequalities of the society that apartheid left behind and entrenched it. “The top 200 high schools in the country produce more distinction marks in maths and science exams than the other 6,476 high schools put together.” On the other side of the spectrum; 47% of high schools did not meet international standards for maths. Compare this to only 2% in Botswana. Nick Spaull of Stellenbosch University called the schools, “cognitive wastelands.”
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In the apartheid years people of colour were deliberately given inferior education, “lest they get uppity or, worse, skilled.” The result of this by the end of apartheid in 1994 was that spending per white pupil was 1.5 to 5 times that of the other populations groups depending on where the school was situated. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, widely regarded to be the architect of apartheid wanted blacks to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” The Economist says that the legacy of this was still evident in South Africa’s education system and “is starkly apparent in the villages around Willowvale.” With parents leaving to look for work in nearby cities like East London; many of the kids were left with grandparents, most of whom were not educated.
The ANC opted for a compromise education system after 1994 giving former whites-only schools the ability to charge fees although they had to accept people from all races. “In theory they cannot exclude any pupil for being too poor, but in practice, poor children do not live near these schools and the costs of transport, uniforms, sports and trips make them prohibitively expensive.”
The Economist said a system based on race had been replaced by one based on wealth in many areas of South African society with the indirect effect that it was still racially-skewed. Under the apartheid system 180 of the 200 top schools were for whites-only. Today 40% of pupils in fee-charging schools were white and 60% were non-whites, consisting mainly of the country’s elites.
Does it mean that there had been no progress since 1994? Spaull said there had been “some progress…he reckons children today are roughly two years ahead of where they would have been before 1994.”But progress was now stalling and the country ranked bottom or near-bottom when they are compared with other countries. “Nearly 80% of children in grade four (9- or 10-year-olds) cannot read and understand sentences in any language; 61% of pupils a year older cannot add or subtract whole numbers.”
The outcome of the poor schooling resulted in only 50-60 % of pupils who started matric, ending up writing the exams and the pass rate was only 40-50 out of a 100. Of this figure only 6% went on to get a degree. The Economist said the poor results had “a big impact on a labour market that offers a premium for skilled labour”. People with only a high-school certificate (28%) were more than four times more likely to be unemployed than graduates.
The newspaper pointed out that the quality of maths teacher in South Africa was poor and it was a major obstacle to better education. 80% of maths teacher, many of whom were educated in the apartheid era, could not do the sums that any 12-13 year old should be able to tackle. The continued lack of performance and accountability was however the responsibility of ANC governments since 1994. “It is all but impossible to fire a teacher in South Africa. Even when school leaders are suspected of sexual harassment of pupils, they are more likely to be moved to a different school than prosecuted.”
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Spending on education was high when compared to the OECD club of rich countries; 6% of GDP and the problems in schools could not be ascribed to a lack of funding. It also compared favourably to other African countries with better outcomes such as Kenya. The Economist said there was a tolerance of failure and this coupled with “the relatively lavish spending on salaries is largely a result of the power of teaching unions.”
It ascribed the power of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), which was one of the largest unions in Cosatu to its political influence within the tri-partite alliance. This power means that it could get away with what the Economist described as “stunning levels of mediocrity and corruption.”
SADTU’s role in the dire state of education in South Africa had been described in a report for the government in 2016 by John Volmink. He reported “widespread fraud and corruption in the school system, such as the sale of jobs for cash or cows and found that SADTU was effectively in control of the department of education in six of the nine provinces.” Volmink commented that SADTU was probably running schools in South Africa.
If you could avoid the school mess; those that were able to do so were taking their children out of state-run schools. It had led to a rise in low-cost private schools with parents preferring private over public schools. This was true in other sectors of South Africa such as security where the number of private security guards equalled the number of policemen in 1997 and since then the number had grown and there were “three times more private guards than policemen.” People who could afford private health, did not go to state hospitals.
The Economist pointed out that many people could not afford to go private for education. The future of the poorest was dependent on government policies. President Cyril Ramaphosa had said he would support the evidence-based reading programme that Paull favoured; this would be a great start. The Economist said to improve education in South Africa meant that he would have to tackle the unions. This was needed to ensure that teachers teach instead of defending their own interests.
