Education took a back seat in this week’s gala performance of that annual farce, the matric results (aka The Matrix Reloaded).
However, given the continued failure of the country’s secondary education system to produce a generation of students that can meet the needs of the country’s economic and social development programmes, the farce is in fact more a tragedy.
Leading the cast of performers is Kader Asmal, Minister of Education and the Cabinet’s supreme maestro of media manipulation, spin doctoring, smoke and mirrors and ruthless self-aggrandisement.
As with The Matrix, in which the reality of what we are is a running question, the matric results pose similar existential puzzles: what’s the show all about?
In a word, politics. That was the real point of this week’s performance, as it is every year.
Sorry to piss on the parade — and congratulations to those matriculants who made it, commiserations to those who didn’t, kudos to the teachers who achieved genuine classroom progress, and to the departmental officials who ensured a process largely free of scandal (exams leaks, papers for sale, marking anomalies — the usual tiresome litany).
On Monday the ministry released the results of individual candidates to the media. There was the usual celebration in schools and provinces about soaring numbers of distinctions.
This all set up nicely the glittering finale. On Tuesday Asmal regaled the nation with the overall pass rate, which was a thumpingly predictable improvement on 2002. We also received the now-familiar ministerial lecture on how to interpret the results — a wonderful improvement in the whole school system was the basic message.
But, in this newspaper and in this space, Professor Jonathan Jansen, dean of education at the University of Pretoria, produced a devastating analysis of 2002’s results. He noted that the improvement was certainly a direct result of the ministry’s ”aggressive policy of surveillance” and pressure on schools to up the results. ”On the political front, well done,” Jansen observed.
But he then asked a number of ”troubling questions”, raised by some of the tactics that schools, under fierce pressure from above to produce the goods or else, used to improve their results. Few of these are educationally beneficial strategies such as genuinely improved teaching, pupil support and so on. The tactics include preventing repeaters from rewriting matric (they’re too likely to fail again and so blot the results), and encouraging (or compelling) large numbers of pupils to write some subjects on the standard grade (where in fact a real, concerted effort is required to fail, because the pass criteria are so low).
In sum, such tactics covertly lower the quality of school education while the figures point, as Asmal would have it, to a dramatic rise in quality. Smoke and mirrors. As Jansen concluded, ”to attribute quality to quantity would be a serious mistake for consumers of public education and its products”.
That was not the first time Jansen — and a host of other education specialists — made these points. They have been doing so for years. But what has changed? Absolutely nothing. Every year the same multimillion-rand pointless exercise, every year the increase in suicidal calls from teenagers to telephone helplines, every year the non-stories about a biology paper leaking in Bronkhorstpruit (or wherever) or mistakes in the standard grade maths paper (followed by ritual soothing noises from the Department of Education), and every year Asmal’s gala performance.
Meanwhile, the gap between matriculants’ skills and those the country’s economy needs widens annually. A recent report by the South African Chamber of Business showed that only 5% of 2002’s grade 12s found employment in the formal sector. That is unlikely to show any improvement in 2004. This is, of course, also partly as a result of the country’s relatively poor economic performance
There is also the ongoing scandal of adult illiteracy: ”almost 10-million of our adult population remain poorly educated and lack the basic knowledge and skills necessary for active participation in our society”, writes Ivor Baatjes, senior lecturer in the Centre for Adult Education at the University of Natal.
Clearly, a substantial proportion of those impoverished millions remain the almost forgotten victims of pre-1994 apartheid policies; but some are also post-1994 school dropouts. In other words, even if Asmal achieved the ultimate Oscar of a 100% pass rate, how would that help the education for economic growth that, Baatjes also observes, is the government’s ”obsession”.
Related to this is the quality of those matriculants who get first prize — matric ”exemption” (a pass that qualifies for university entrance). Part of the Asmalesque smoke and mirrors is that this percentage, always small, tends to be buried quietly in the welter of the sexier large figures (especially the overall pass rate). But it is well known that universities, and different faculties within them, have such a low regard for the quality of a matric exemption that some have their own entrance tests and other requirements. Speak also to any academic, at any tertiary institution, and you hear the same despairing refrain: the quality of the first-year students who beam up at their lecturers in the opening term is enough to make a dedicated teacher weep.
Here is a truly worrying contradiction in Asmal’s overall performance: what he is doing with his left hand (the pumping-up of national euphoria over the matric results) threatens to undermine what he is doing with his right: namely, trying to expand both quantity and quality in higher education.
That’s the problem with conjuring tricks: they look impressive, but they’re fake.
Meantime, the political charade continues that the whole school system is triumphantly and seamlessly improving by leaps and bounds. And because politics is actually the point of the whole matric debacle, fixing it is going to require a political intervention. The whole Cabinet, and certainly the labour, finance and trade and industry ministers, needs to start taking a close interest in what their education colleague is up to.