Expletives are scrawled across the classroom walls, the library ceiling has collapsed and up to 45 pupils cram into each filthy classroom — when the teachers turn up that is.
But despite the shoddy state of her school, 14-year-old Constance Mpho has even bigger worries.
”Smoking and killing people,” said the pupil from Veritas Secondary School in Soweto.
”Those are the main problems,” she said, recounting how a 16-year-old boy was recently stabbed to death in a dispute with a fellow pupil over R1.
With conditions like these, it’s no surprise that pupils at Veritas and other schools in South Africa’s tough black townships fail to produce glittering exam results: just half of Veritas pupils passed the school-leaving matric in 2005.
A recent report found almost 80% of South Africa’s schools are failing their children — fuelling poverty and exacerbating an acute skills gap in Africa’s biggest economy.
And 12 years after the collapse of apartheid and its segregated school system — which created white schools with top-class facilities but left black schools chronically under-funded — classrooms are as unequal as ever.
Contrast Veritas with St John’s College, the country’s top private school where ivy-clad quadrangles resemble England’s elite colleges in Oxford and Cambridge and well-scrubbed boys — mostly white — spring to their feet when teachers speak. Here, exam failure is anathema.
”If anything the gap [between the best and worst schools] has widened,” said Salim Vally, senior researcher at the Education Policy Unit of Johannesburg’s Witswatersrand University. ”The differential is now by class, but in our country that usually translates into racial terms.”
Skills gap
A recent report by South Africa’s Institute of Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) found that 80% of schools provided education ”of such poor quality that they constitute a very significant obstacle to social and economic development”.
Myriad factors from the impact of HIV/Aids and poverty to poor time management are to blame, but experts say a dire shortage of teachers is the chief problem.
About 20 000 teachers leave the profession each year while only 6 000 join up — partly due to poor pay and conditions. And of those already teaching, up to half have inadequate levels of literacy, according to the IJR report.
Education shortfalls cause ripples throughout the economy.
South Africa wants to spur growth by spending bumper tax revenues on grand infrastructure projects, but its plans are stymied by a dearth of engineers.
Companies are trying to meet affirmative action targets but end up fighting over a tiny pool of black executives.
Africa’s most advanced economy spent about 5,4% of its budget on education in 2004 — more than Britain or the United States but less than it spent in 1991, according to the United Nations Human Development Report released this month.
”[Education] is the country’s main problem,” said Nick Taylor, who wrote the IJR report and runs education non governmental organisation JET. ”Our schools are not producing the skills or the work ethic that we need. We are simply not preparing our children.”
Segregation
In theory, all South African schools have been open to black and white students alike since the early 1990s.
But because even state institutions set their own fees, the best schools remain the preserve of the still largely white middle class, while the poor are often forced to settle for sub-standard teaching, chaos and violence.
St John’s charges high-school students R60 000 ($8 188) a year — more than many South Africans earn — while Veritas charges just R110 and assumes that most pupils, the majority of whom live in makeshift tin shacks, won’t pay at all.
Many of the best government schools — which boast extra teachers, libraries and sports fields — also charge tens of thousands of rand a year.
But although huge inequalities in education perpetuate South Africa’s yawning gap between rich and poor, there are some signs the divide no longer runs purely along colour lines.
Around half the children at the former whites-only Risidale Primary, a well-run school in a leafy Johannesburg suburb, are now black.
And Taylor noted that while most of the schools reserved for blacks under apartheid still performed poorly, 600 out of almost 5 000 now rank among the country’s best.
Back in Soweto, Veritas Principal Ditiro Moloto says that although his exam results are dismal, standards have improved sharply since apartheid, when barely one in five children would leave his school with a qualification.
And at St John’s, 25% of the pupils are non-white, compared to about one in 10 in the graduating class of 1994, when South Africans voted in the first all-race elections.
Clusters of boys — white, black and Indian — meander together across the pristine lawn. One 17-year old seemed aghast at any suggestion of racism at the school.
”We all get along here, black, white, whatever,” said black student Mabine Seabe, in a polished accent. ”I came here because it’s the best school in Johannesburg. I guess it attracts people from elite families because of the cost, but race is not an issue.” — Reuters