There are moments in public discourse that echo inside a cave, a sound so repeated and unexamined that it begins to feel like revelation simply because it is familiar. The annual lament about the decline of mathematics and physical science in South Africa is one such echo. Each year, a new study is announced with great urgency; each year, a crisis is declared, as if for the first time.
Yet if we pay close attention to the decades-long patterns of schooling in this country, we notice that this is not news. The problem with the echoing noise is not that the warnings are entirely wrong. The difficulty is that this noise continues to arise from a vantage point that can see only deficit and never possibility, a vantage point I shall call — borrowing the language of metaphor — “the Western mirror”.
In this mirror, South African learners appear as faded reflections of an ideal norm; learners who should have mastered early numeracy, experienced coherent teaching, and progressed through schools that function like those in affluent parts of the world. Minister of basic education Siviwe Gwarube, in her speech announcing the 2025 matric results last week, was unafraid to address public pressure to improve the country’s educational outcomes. “People ask about ‘quick wins’,” she said.
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“But real reform in a system this size cannot be PR-led. It is deep work that succeeds only when leadership lines up resources, accountability, trust and data behind one clear direction: strengthening the foundations of learning.” The minister noted that the National Education and Training Council (NETC), established in 2025, is now reviewing assessment and progression policies across grades R to 12 to ensure that expectations are clear, support is provided earlier, and learning gaps do not compound by the time learners reach matric. Those who speak of a decline in participation in mathematics and the physical sciences usually begin their account in a very recent year.
They report that the number of learners taking core mathematics has fluctuated over several examination cycles, and they urge us to be alarmed. If we remain within the Western mirror, we compare ourselves to international benchmarks and find only disappointment. If we step outside it, another picture comes into view.
According to the Institute of Race Relations, the overall matric pass rate in 1993 was about 37%, one of the lowest in South Africa’s educational history. In the same year, the university entrance pass rate, then known as endorsement, dropped to about 8%. Detailed subject-level pass rates for mathematics from this period are not widely available in publicly accessible digital form.
Statistical reporting in the early 1990s was limited and uneven, and records are often preserved only in print archives. However, given the extremely low overall pass and endorsement rates, mathematics performance during this period was generally very poor, with many learners failing outright or achieving very low marks. In 1980, the overall matric pass rate stood at about 53.2%, yet success was sharply stratified by race.
Black African learners achieved extremely low success rates in mathematics and in endorsement passes compared with their white counterparts. From this historical vantage point, the years since democracy have not seen a fall from a golden age but a long, uneven effort to widen the gate. Curriculum reforms, from Curriculum 2005 through successive revisions to the present CAPS framework, were not merely technical adjustments.
These efforts to transform mathematics and science from elite subjects for a few into gateway subjects for the many. In the process, the curriculum was softened in places and then strengthened again. Euclidean geometry was removed from the compulsory core, offered as an optional paper, and later reinstated as a compulsory core subject. The final examination has gradually become more demanding.
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