Director-General for Basic Education Hubert Mathanzima Mweli responds to recent claims about the ‘political theatre’ surrounding the annual announcement of the matric pass rate, arguing that attempts to present a narrative of decline in education are ‘misleading’. With only a few days to go before the release of the matric results on 12 January, it’s that time of year for opinion pieces warning you not to be fooled by the matric pass rate or by the surrounding political theatre, where the government celebrates those who passed and the few who excelled, while hiding the awful truth about a deteriorating education system. A recent example of this is the 2 January piece by Muhammad Coovadia in Daily Maverick.
Coovadia’s piece – and there will be many more like it in the coming days – is full of wide-ranging and dramatic imagery (children walking long distances in the freezing winter into an educational furnace), extended metaphors (cracked walls, death certificates and tombstones, and of course the Titanic), and moral outrage (explicitly framing the government as “the oppressor” who must be stopped). But after all the dramatic language, one must ask: What are the specific claims being made, whether implicitly or explicitly, and do they hold up? I can identify three main claims underpinning Coovadia’s article.
But these are very much the same claims that others have made previously and that will predictably underpin many other matric results opinion pieces. When Coovadia uses words like “collapse” and metaphors like a sinking ship to describe the school system, the clear meaning is that education in South Africa has got worse. Yet his article has not a single piece of evidence to justify that assertion.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
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Nor does Coovadia tell us when his pre-collapse era was – that time in our history when South Africans had better access to schooling, had higher rates of literacy, and were more likely to enter and complete university. His article does present some statistics, but they are all from a single point in time. When he (correctly) refers to our poor level of performance in international assessments, he does not mention that we have significantly improved in these same assessments over the past two decades.
When he reminds us of the dropout rate and those children who do not reach the matric examinations, he fails to describe the trend over time. In fact, for black South Africans born in the 1950s and 1960s, only one in 10 completed matric. Today, about six in 10 complete secondary education.
We certainly have serious problems: dropout rates are still too high, for example, and Coovadia is absolutely correct to point to weak learning foundations (like reading) as a contributing factor. But virtually all education system indicators have been moving in the right direction over time: the percentage of young children accessing Early Learning Programmes, the percentage of 7- to 15-year-olds attending school, the percentage of all young people who complete the National Senior Certificate or an equivalent qualification, the percentage of all youths who access and complete university degrees, the percentage of learners experiencing some form of violence at school… the list goes on. I challenge readers this matric results season to ask themselves when reading an article: Is the author presenting statistics from two points in time, thus making a valid claim of decline?
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