The 1997 Matric Catastrophe - What Lies Ahead?
After all the fantasia accompanying the launch of outcomes-based education in 1997 the results of the Senior Certificate examination throughout the country savagely brought down to earth the education authorities in the different provinces. Experts had earlier in 1997 assessed South Africa’s pupils’ standing in Mathematics and Science as being the weakest among forty-one countries that they had studied. Those same experts, after a preliminary study of the results of the end-of-year SC examinations, predicted that they would be appalling overall. Despite the assessment of neutral experts, the provincial ministers of education, Prof. Bengu and other national education administrators were confident of a "great improvement" in the results over those of 1996. The facts that emerged were indeed appalling, catastrophic and tragic in the extreme. What made things even worse was the package of explanations for the poor results advanced by many of the commentators who attempted to analyse them.
The provincial results varied from 37% pass in the Northern Province to some 78% in the Western Cape. In the country’s schools the number of passes ranged from zero to 100%. But while percentages are some kind of guide to the success or failure of candidates they obscured a great deal of the harsh reality of what had been happening to hundreds of thousands of our youth in the final and most vital year of their formal education.
For one, the overwhelming majority of the luckless failures were from the poorest section of the population. Not only had they lived under the most depressing and unstimulating social conditions. They had had their primary and secondary schooling in a disjointed, deprived system which made SC candidates survivors within it. Their physical resources were for the most part absent or minimal. This much the important Audit by the Human Sciences Research Council in 1997 revealed. And these candidates for the most part did not have well-qualified, motivated teachers to guide them through the social and educational jungle in which they strove to excel.
Thus when one considers that more than half the number of approximately 550 thousand candidates did not ‘make it’, the magnitude of the catastrophe is only partly revealed. The "matriculation exemption" pass grade is but a rough guide to the quality or standard of a pupil’s success. In the absence of any other measure at this stage of the attempts to assess in greater detail the size and standard of the disaster, it is but one measure, and a limited one at that.
What did the overall results show? More than four-fifths of the successful candidates did not attain even the basic minimum required for this matriculation exemption. The standards of the successful candidates who were ranked below this level were disturbing to say the least. Not only does this suggest very poor standards indeed in candidates’ attainments. It also suggests further that the perennial escape route of devising curricula with "easy options" among subject-choices that do not enable candidates to qualify for "exemption" is a national crime. This includes the avoidance of key subjects such as mathematics and the sciences.
Then the next question suggests itself. More than half the candidates - some 275 thousand - failed the examinations outright. What were their attainments like if those of candidates who gained school-leaving certificates were low by any standards? No useful purpose is served by pretending that the best was done under difficult circumstances. Still less does the minister’s comment that in the known circumstances he was satisfied with the results provide any consolation for the more than a quarter of a million unsuccessful candidates.
The facts showed, too, that "success" was a term with very limited meaning. The absence of adequate pre-primary schooling for most children prevented primary schooling, as it now exists, from providing an adequate foundation for secondary schooling, which clearly, even among the successful candidates, provides a totally inadequate foundation for the tertiary education of hundreds of thousands of the youth. The school-leaving certificate provides no entry to universities, technikons or post-matriculation training colleges. Those universities which, for reasons that need not now be gone into, admit students without the "exemption" lay rods in pickle for their own backs and those of the students whose inadequate pre-university preparation almost guarantees failure at that level and creates the multitude of problems bugging such institutions.
On top of all these considerations are those springing from the severe cuts of some 30 thousand teaching staff from all sections of the national education system. Added to this is the known lack of textbooks, consumable stationary and the classroom and laboratory equipment that is basic to the teaching of key subjects. It is a sad reflection on those at the top of the educational hierarchy in the provinces that they neither refer to this gathering threat to educational standards, nor accept, as honest educators would, the blame for dealing pupils short in a way in which the previous governments did not!
It is an incontrovertible fact that what is happening in the schools is caused by at least two obvious considerations. First is the reckless disregard of the primary importance of adequate teaching staff and of the regulation of pupil numbers in classes according to established successful education practise - not arbitrary pupil-to-teacher ratios dictated by the World Bank and the global bullies who hold debt-ridden countries to ransom. This is inextricably bound up with the further diktat to the South African government to cut expenditure on social services and reduce budget deficits. The impact of this policy on the fate of schools generally is of little or no problem to the plutocratic bureaucrats who plot the State budget for this country.
The second consideration is the process of holding both parents and teachers to ransom. Their abiding interest in their children forces parents to pay school fees, buy books and stationery and to raise funds to pay for the maintenance of the schools. A similar abiding interest in their pupils drives teachers who can bear up within an exceedingly stressful system to do the most they can for them - against all odds - in the hope that things will work out for the best.
But here, at the end of 1997, there was concrete evidence that even the initial steps in the trashing of schools produced at the end of the schooling process results which were indeed disastrous.
This year in circumstances even worse than before, the mystique of ‘outcomes-based-education’ is expected to turn the base-metal of what has been happening so far into gold. Prof. Bengu no doubt has read the story of Rumpelstiltskin who span straw into strands of gold in the hope of winning the heart of a beautiful maiden. The fate of Rumpelstiltskin is well known to those children who have had an exciting primary school education. Only Prof. Bengu and his army of consultants and cheerleaders could believe in the wonders that the dwarf is supposed to have achieved - then to fail at the stage where outcomes really mattered.
We cannot share the sophistries of others who have tried to find another nursery-school consolation in what happened in our high schools in 1997. A Dr. Jean Hofmeyer (a well-known researcher and writer in the field of education) explained that in the high rate of failure she saw the government’s determination to maintain the high standards of the examinations! She was followed by the State President who, in his opening address to parliament on Friday February 4, in commenting on the lower pass rate, said that the quality of the passes was higher than in the past, that the examinations were of a higher standard, that the marking was stricter than before and that fewer examination question papers had been stolen. Both these commentators must believe that there are jewels in the heads of toads!
The realities are sadly different. A myriad of private schools, ‘finishing’ schools and fly-by-night institutions will spring up like toadstools in the wake of the 1997 Senior Certificate tragedy. But they will offer little by way of a solution to the hundreds of thousands of scholars who, at the end of 1997, joined the hundreds of thousands of victims of the same system that betrayed them in previous years, and who are strenuously seeking a way forward in a society that has destroyed any serious education for the majority of our youth.
Let the "experts" do some honest labour for a change. Let them analyse critically the inner structure of the disastrous results of 1997, 1996, 1995 … and before. Let them try to understand what the outcome must necessarily be for education when, to satisfy budgetary requirements, they sack teachers, crowd classrooms, deny children textbooks and stationery and lie to justify their practises. Let them examine the tortuous paths along which millions of children are driven unsuccessfully to acquire a medium of instruction, a course that casts them adrift in all the most critical phases of their formal education. Let them also realise that again in 1998 fourteen million boys and girls will face possible disaster …?
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL.68 #1, OFFICIAL ORGAN
OF THE TEACHERS' LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, JANUARY-MARCH 1998]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
Go to MTA's HomePage - Do not pass BEGIN, Do not collect R200.
