To clap for the matric pass rate is to become complicit in a tragic masquerade. It is to admire the golden paint freshly rolled onto the hull of a ship that is already taking on water, tossing confetti onto the deck of a Titanic that has been sinking for years. Soon, the minister of basic education will step up to a podium, draped in the velvet of officialdom, flanked by shiny trophies and beaming officials.
A single pass rate percentage will be unveiled, a number polished to perfection. Newsrooms will run photographs of top achievers, those rare outliers who made it through the system’s furnace and are now held up as a symbol to hide the cracks in the walls. But, as a mental health practitioner, I have worked with the children behind those walls, and I refuse to clap.
My hands and heart are too heavy. To clap for the pass rate is to become complicit in a tragic masquerade. The cameras never capture the silence of my therapy or assessment room.
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I work with bright adolescents who are eager to be heard. They have stories inside them; stories of survival and trauma. But what always breaks me and makes me shed a tear is knowing that, despite their hopes and dreams, their future is grim because of the failures of others.
When I ask these learners, full of potential, to write down their thoughts and complete simple tasks my 5-year-old niece can do without hesitation, the air seems to leave the room. I see the physical recoil. The shame that rises in their cheeks is not the blush of shyness; it is the red heat of humiliation.
I hesitate to ask them to write because I know the secret they have been forced to keep: they cannot construct a basic sentence. They cannot wrestle the grammar into line. These are high pupils who are nearing the exit door of the system.
I recall, with a lingering sense of shock that never quite dulls, the first time I saw the numbers that explained that terror. During my internship training, I was reviewing a learner’s marks from a quintile 1 high school when a shiver ran down my spine. The average of a Grade 9 class sat below 20% for both mathematics and English.
But the real horror was not the number itself. It was what the number meant: learners who had failed badly were still ranked “above average” simply because almost everyone else was failing too. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
In our public education system, a learner who achieves a score of 30% is considered a scholar. At first, I consoled myself by treating it as an isolated disaster, a single school in crisis. Then I saw it again.
And again. In different districts, different schools, different cohorts. The same pattern of catastrophic averages and normalised failure kept repeating.
What began as one disturbing report quickly revealed itself as something far worse. The bar has not just been lowered; we have buried it underground and handed out shovels. If we strip away the public relations gloss of the “pass rate” and examine the bare statistics, the underlying reality is not just fragile, it is fractured.
Start early, where the damage begins. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study found that 81% of South African Grade 4 learners are unable to read for meaning in any of the official languages. Let that settle in your chest. Four out of five 10-year-olds are staring at a page and only seeing ink, moving their eyes across a page for tokenism.
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