Matric results were released a week ago and the crisis of inequality was emphasised once again. There’s still an enormous gap in achievement levels between white/urban and black/rural schools and today’s frameworks to transform this predicament do not properly capture the emergency we are under.
A more productive conversation we could have is:
- First – provincial percentages of matric outcomes will never be the precise calculator to use to measure the quality of our education. We can leave that circus to ministers to congratulate themselves. For activists, the task is to dig deeper and ask the right questions.
- Second – the foundation of basic education is embedded on the quality of our achievement levels in science, mathematics and African languages.
Top countries in research, science and innovation with industrious economies are all devoted in anchoring their education systems on high standards in these three disciplines – both in teaching and in learning terms.
China, Cuba and Singapore, to name a few, possess the best professionals in medicine, social sciences, engineering, commerce and research from their own institutions and according to their own developmental needs – sometimes with none of their professionals being able to speak a single word of English. To think that these countries were grappling with absolute poverty just a few decades ago is beyond comprehension.
- Third – beyond science, mathematics and African languages, our children between grades 1 to 5 should read, write and speak with meaning and joy in the classroom. The entire basic education system from grades 1 to 12 should be a developmental trajectory where the government gets to plan and shape the future of our revolution. Such a system would be deliberate about its recruitment strategy to generate the best teaching personnel that would make science, mathematics and the entire enterprise of schooling an exciting experience for every child.
For Cuba and China, an education system is the insulin of their revolutionary struggle for total emancipation. For us, it’s the opposite – because:
- from the total number of children who began grade 1 in 2010, only half wrote and passed matric in 2021. The system is unable to account for what happened to the rest. These are mainly black children in rural provinces.
- black high schools have more matriculants writing maths literacy than physical science and mathematics – which reveals the lack of strategy by the state in planning our educational priorities according to our most pressing developmental needs.
- more than 80% of black high schools have not recorded distinctions in science, mathematics and African languages – which reveals the absence of quality teaching in these subjects in these schools.
- white schools still dominate university enrolments in the top five research universities in the country, with some receiving lucrative scholarships to study in Euro-American universities – which shows how we could still possibly be faced with racialised inequality by 2050.
Many black parents know about this crisis, and that’s why they have taken a shortcut and disinvested from black education by taking their children to white schools – even at the expense of their dehumanisation.
Even government ministers – who clap hands for the 30% achievement rates in black schools – send their children to Westerford College.
As activists, we must never get tired of underscoring the true essence of quality black education. Our determination should be awakened by townships schools such as Ulwazi High School in Mdantsane, Eastern Cape, which achieved a 100% pass rate for the fifth year in a row in the 2021 matric results with:
- 100% pass rate in isiXhosa with 50 distinctions,
- 100% pass rate in mathematics with 11 distinctions,
- 100% pass rate in science with 10 distinctions.
This school represents the excellence in black education that has always been the tradition and understanding of what quality education is to black communities. The taking of black children to white schools is a post-1994 illogical misrepresentation of reconstruction and development.
Instead, loyalty to black institutions and the community investing in them has always defined our own logic of quality education, excellence and transformation.
This was the paradigm of democratic and transformative education according to black communities. Nothing else.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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