Congratulations to the latest crop of school matriculants have been pouring in. Despite the enforced closure of schools for a month (June-July) throughout the football World Cup hosted by South Africa, followed by a three-week teachers’ strike (August 17-September 6), the pass rate for the 2010 school-leaving ‘matric’ examination, taken in November, has jumped by seven percentage points to 68, bringing an apparent end to a six-year decline. But with half of all pupils dropping out of school before taking the exam and a required pass mark of just 30-40 percent, it is too soon for rejoicing. Education standards in Africa’s biggest and most advanced economy remain dismal. Barely one in ten South African pupils qualifies for university and only 5 percent earn a degree.
Seventeen years after the end of apartheid, black pupils still generally fare much worse than their white counterparts. In 2009 just over half of black matric candidates passed, compared with 99 percent of whites, 92 percent of Indians and 76 percent of coloureds (people of mixed race). Though blacks now account for nearly half of all university students (and 80 percent of the whole population), less than one in 20 of the relevant black age group, still facing harsh economic and social disadvantages, ends up with a degree, compared with almost 50 percent of all whites.
Even though public schooling was desegregated in 1994, the vast majority of poor black children continue to go to severely deprived, overwhelmingly black schools. Two-thirds of state schools have no library or computer; 90 percent have no science laboratory; more than half of all pupils either have no textbooks or have to share them. Whites, by contrast, together with a small but growing contingent from the black middle-class, send their children to the former all-white ‘Model C’ state schools offering superior facilities, or, increasingly, to private schools.
President Jacob Zuma has promised to make education his priority. Money is not the main problem: education already gobbles up about 20 percent of the government’s budget, representing over 5 percent of GDP. But attitudes, particularly those of the teachers who are heavily unionised, will have to change. Angie Motshekga, the schools minister, admits the system is largely “in crisis” and will take 20 years to fix. Others fear it may need longer.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)