Matric, STEM, and South Africa’s education crisis: Andrew Kenny

Key points:.Mismatch in university applications: Overflow in some fields, shortage in STEM.Grade inflation vs. reality: Matric results fail to reflect true competencies.Education challenges: ANC policies, SADTU, and technical training decline..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.By Andrew Kenny*.In one newspaper, I read that our universities in 2025 are overwhelmed with applications for student places: the University of Johannesburg has 33 applicants for every place available. But in another newspaper, I read that universities are desperately short of suitably qualified applicants for science and engineering; there are far more places available than there are applicants with good enough matric passes in maths and science. .At the end of last year, an international educational report on 58 counties (2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), found that South African pupils came stone last in maths and science. This points to a defective educational system. But then this week I read that our matric results for 2024 are wonderfully wonderful, the best ever, with every province getting an over 84% pass rate and the Free State getting over 91%. Distinctions – A passes – are sprinkled like confetti all over the country's schools. This points to a highly successful educational system. What's going on?.First, there has been massive "grade inflation". I matriculated in 1965 (at Fish Hoek High School in the southern Cape Peninsula). In those days, A passes were rare. The top pupil at Fish Hoek only achieved two As, which was considered pretty good. I got an F for Afrikaans, which I think was between 33.3% and 40%. .Forty years later, the daughter of a friend, who had been brought up in Kenya and whose Afrikaans was even worse than mine (which believe me is bad!), got a B for matric Afrikaans. Such grade inflation is not confined to South Africa. In England an O-Level question in the 1960s was re-issued, word for word, as an A-Level question in the 1980s. .Speak to any lecturer at our universities and ask about the competence of matriculants entering first year university, and you will hear it is just going down. A maths professor at a leading Gauteng university says that in his 1976 matric year the dux of his school got four As. Now at his university, they get students with nine As who need special help to get through first year maths: he adds that the maths curriculum hasn't changed in 30 years. Quite right too; the foundation for maths is unchanging. The basic maths of the 19th Century is ideal preparation for further studies in AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (what a silly phrase!). I see that Fish Hoek High got a 99.5% matric pass rate for 2024, something unheard of in my day..Second, the throughput rate, the percentage of pupils entering Grade 1 that go on to enter the matric year, is very low, at about 60%. Apparently this rate is actually dropping. Some pupils may leave academic studies after Grade 9 to go to a technical college. This should be fine; indeed it should be encouraged, since not everybody is suited to academic study and in South Africa there is a desperate shortage of technical skills. We need plumbers more than most professors; we need electricians, mechanics, welders, fitters and builders more than social scientists and philosophers. .Read more: Jardine's party, Change Starts Now, launches vision for a working and caring South Africa.Germany, which was a highly successful industrial country until recently when green nonsense crippled it, had a much higher ratio of qualified artisans to university graduates than we have. Unfortunately, our technical training programs are in decline. Many drop out at the end of Grade 9 to do nothing at all, contributing to our catastrophic youth unemployment. Some of our schools deliberately reduce the number of pupils entering matric in order to boost their percentage of matric passes. The Free State, which has the highest matric pass rate in the country but one of the lowest throughput rates, is notorious for this..The huge number of applications for university entrances are in subjects such as Public Relations & Communication, Nursing, Education, the Arts and Humanities, Social Work, Law and Commerce. There is a desperate need for more nurses, but not for some of the other courses applied avialble. .The two main reasons young people want to go to university are the hope for a better paying job and social status. South Africa is a highly class-conscious society, much more so than Germany, and a university degree is regarded as much higher class than a technical qualification. Hence the desire to get into university in almost any subject you can manage. Most applicants cannot manage the hard professions..Maths and science are described as foundation subjects for professions such as engineering, technology, actuarial studies, computer studies and artificial intelligence. Our schools are not equipping our children properly in these subjects. Maths is the basis of most technical qulaifications. You cannot study even basic physics without a good understanding of maths; higher physics needs very rigorous maths. Mechanical, civil and electrical engineering are really just applied physics, and physics depends on maths..Maths was by far my best subject at school and I found it very easy – too easy, I'm afraid, giving me an inflated opinion of my own mathematical ability. I did quite well in first year maths and physics at UCT, but not particularly well. I did less well in second year and floundered in third year. In my honours year, I was hopelessly out of my depth. Years later, as a mature student, I returned to UCT to do a degree in mechanical engineering, and coped easily with all the maths required. In most engineering, the required maths is practical and understandable, even to people of limited mathematical ability, such as myself. Such maths I feel sure could be taught to a sufficient number of our young people to meet our requirements for engineering..I was a high school teacher for five years, teaching maths and science in South Africa and England. I found maths by far the easiest subject to teach and mark. (I shudder to think what it's like marking English essays or artwork.) I taught O-level maths for three years at a private school for girls in England, who were mainly interested in ballet, drama and music. I didn't much like teaching and they didn't much like maths, so there was an unspoken agreement that I should just get as many of them as possible through O-level maths exams. If mathematic appreciation came, fine, but the main aim was to give them a qualification. I was quite successful and, since I am not a gifted teacher, I really do think it would not be too difficult to produce a generation of maths teachers who could produce the number of good matric passes in maths..Read more: Andrew Kenny: South Africa's education system is under siege.The major obstacle to all learning in South Africa, dominating everything I have written above, is the disastrous education system the ANC has produced for most of our children over the last 30 years. The ANC elite is well aware how awful it is, which is why they never send their own children to the state schools they administer, but to private schools or semi-private schools. (DEI crusaders now demand a lot of money for attacking these few good schools as being racist; they deliberately demoralise decent, hard-working, committed teachers without a racist bone in their bodies; the IRR's heroic Richard Wilkinson has pointed this out forcefully, rigorously and accurately.).Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), affirmative action, employment equity and cadre deployment at most schools have ruined the education of most of our black children. The ANC, for political reasons, has handed over most of our education to the Mafia-like teachers' union, the South African Deomcratic Teachers Union (SADTU), which cares nothing about the welfare of the children in its care and everything about the salaries, privileges and monopoly of its own members, many of whom are unqualified, incompetent, lazy and irresponsible. Until this is sorted out, all I have written above about how to get good maths teachers is just pie in the sky for the majority of our children – poor black children..I said above that we need a higher standard of school maths to produce engineers. But do we need more engineers? Yes and no. Engineers are essential for industry and manufacturing. During the years of National Party (apartheid) rule, South Africa was rapidly industrialising and expanding the manufacturing economy, and so we needed a lot of engineers, which our universities and technical colleges produced very successfully..However, since 1994 the ANC has reversed the trend. South Africa has been deindustrialising and shrinking her manufacturing, which is becoming a smaller and smaller part of our total economy. The Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition has, in effect, become the Minister of Deindustrialisation. You cannot have the ANC's racial policies of BEE, affirmative action and employment equity, and growing industries. So the ANC chose to have a shrinking industry. So we don't need more engineers here, of any colour..Although we do need engineers to maintain our infrastructure, which is collapsing because of the lack of qualified, experienced engineers. In the past, such engineers were all white, so the ANC went to great pains to get rid of them – in Eskom, in Transnet, in Prasa, in our water supply and sanitation systems – with results we see today. Will the ANC now allow white engineers to be employed by our municipalities? Probably not. So it will have to produce good black engineers in a hurry, and for this it will have to have better black maths matriculants..The South African economy is moving from industry and manufacturing (secondary economy) to finance and services (tertiary economy). This usually happens only to developed economies, not developing economies such as ours. Our move away from industrial economy is because of the ANC's racial and statist policies. Accountants are becoming all important, and they don't need much maths. But actuaries – insurance mathematicians – need a lot of maths, especially high-level statistics. They are extremely well paid – unlike engineers – so if you're good at maths and want to earn a lot of money become an actuary. .Read more: BELA Bill: Threatening public education and increasing inequality – Andrew Kenny.Mathematics is of uncertain value in economic theory. In the USA, if you want to do a post graduation degree in economics, you have to have a good graduate degree in maths. You then study complicated mathematical economic theories, many of which, I regret to say, have proved disastrous when applied in the real world. Higher maths does not seem to help the understanding of economics. I think this is the only field where it fails. Economics seems to depend almost entirely on human psychology, the rationality of which is very difficult to analyse, making it so far beyond the range of any mathematics..I have spoken about "practical maths". This cannot be clearly defined. At the girls' school, where I was teaching algebra, the girls often asked. "What use is this?" It was actually of great use, essential use, in developing engineering understanding, allowing engineers to design and build machines of transport, communication and power generation. It also helps to solve everyday problems with an extra layer of logic, but I found this difficult to explain to the girls. Some seemingly abstract mathematical theorems have proved of enormous practical value. Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, seemed of no practical value at the time. It applies to all forms of energy, not just nuclear. A compressed spring weighs slightly less than a relaxed spring because of the energy of compression. But this is of no practical concern since the mass difference is miniscule. .However, with nuclear energy, the difference is considerable and very useful for calculating energy yields. In the 19th Century, a German mathematician, Bernhard Reimann, using differential geometry, produced an unbelievably complicated and abstract theory about multi-dimensional surfaces. It was a mathematical masterpiece but it seemed a pure abstraction, of no practical value whatsoever. .In the 20th Century, Albert Einstein, a brilliant physicist with piercing insights into the nature of nature but not a very good mathematician, was working on his General Theory of Relativity. He had the physical framework he needed but not the maths to fill it. Then he turned to Riemann and – lo! – there was precisely what he needed. He dropped Riemann's maths into his own physics and produced one of the greatest works of science of all time. His theory has been put to every physical test possible, every observation possible, and in each case his predictions about spacetime have proved pin-point accurate. So if, unlike me, you are capable of higher levels of mathematics, you should always pursue them, whether or not you think they might have any practical value. They just might have..The main obstacle to understanding maths seems to be psychological. Many people, perhaps most people, seem to believe it is mysterious and difficult, and enter the maths classroom with their minds set on failure. Most of them are innately able to do maths at a good enough level to pass school exams and be useful, but they seem to shut their minds to this ability. They need to relax their minds, allow the logic of the maths the teacher is presenting to enter their brains step by step, even if they don't yet realise the significance of each step. Understanding will come. Then we shall have enough good maths passes in matric to meet the urgent needs of our universities and our economy..Read also:.Matric exam cheating scandal exposed – teachers gave answers on WhatsApp groupsSpare us from more state interference in educationCecil John Rhodes would have loved the ANC's new education bill – Andrew Kenny.*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

Matric, STEM, and South Africa’s education crisis: Andrew Kenny

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