The results of the national Senior Certificate examination in 1996 are nothing short of an utter catastrophe. More than four hundred thousand of the country's youth wrote the examinations. Some two hundred thousand of the candidates failed them. Most of the candidates were the survivors within a segregated schooling system that had already wreaked havoc in the lives of the young boys and girls who had entered the school-system about twelve years before. Along the trouble-laden path from the kindergarten to the final "matric" year hundreds of thousands of the country's youth had already "failed", had left school and had joined the hostile world of mainly unskilled, unemployed and unemployable workers. With all these raw facts before him, the Minister of National Education Professor Sibusiso Bengu declared that he was satisfied with the results of the 1996 Senior Certificate examination. This is nothing less than a process of turning completely upside down all sense of values and evaluation of what is going on in the schools of the country.
The entire 1996 scenario was made worse by the extraordinary chaos that marked the examination processes. In every province there was clear evidence both of the theft of examination question papers by officials and of the sale of these papers to pupils. In every province the security, marking and checking of scripts became a Gilbertian circus. The collation of data on computers and the determination of a pupil's success or failure were in thousands of instances reduced to a lottery. Even by the end of January 1997 several hundred pupils in Natal had not had their results finalised; the Natal Education Department faced the threat of a Supreme Court Action by irate parents. The Gauteng Department had in December 1996 omitted to account for the marks in Speech and Drama of 2000 candidates. In short, to the utter catastrophe reflected in the overall results must be added an inexcusable national disaster in the handling of the final year of assessment of the education of the nation's children. The nine provincial education ministries, overloaded with new and old bureaucrats of every kind, reflected a kind of chaos that could only have sprung from gross incompetence, ignorance and lack of the most elementary sense of social responsibility.
The inane response of the Minister of National Education was not the only one of its kind. The chairperson of the parliamentary Education Commission spoke with some enthusiasm about the examinations' having been the first of their kind where all pupils in the schools wrote the same examinations. This is a South African myth, one of many. Each province had its own examinations, supposedly of the same standard. It is true that all pupils within a particular province wrote the same examinations. But it is also a fact of history that for many years before the Eiselen-de Vos Malan Christian National Education era pupils in all schools in certain provinces did write the same examinations. Neither of these education "experts" sought to make any critical examination of the 1996 picture to arrive at any worthwhile assessment of what it really meant.
Those pupils who passed have at least two reasons for feeling a sense of triumph. They did survive the ordeal of passing through a segregated, race-ridden and debased schooling system. They survived the chaos, dishonesty and leprous administration blunders of the provincial bureaucracies. On the other hand, there is every reason that they should face with the utmost caution and determination the field of post-secondary education, a terrain with an increasing collection of obstacles and inadequacies.
At this juncture state officials may delude people into believing that by writing "one examination" the candidates or education in general has surmounted the many problems in education. But their assumptions about what the overall pass rates mean are sadly wrong.
The failure of half the number of pupils in the final school year is, let us repeat, a catastrophe, a loss of vital human growth potential. But this loss has been suffered in each of eleven years before the final "matric" year. What is worse, on the basis of the present performance and general state of affairs in the schools, is that the chance of survival of future groups of pupils is far slimmer. It is one thing to hail a provision in the "Bill of Rights" of an "education" for all children, regardless of who they may be. It is quite another to claim that what has finally emerged from the schools is "satisfactory". This claim is a palpable fraud.
The 32% pass rate in the Northern Cape, the 80% pass rate in the Western Cape, or the 57% rate in Gauteng do not themselves tell the true story of what lies behind such statistics. For one, the official figure of a national pass rate of 52% is a dubious one when only three provinces had pass rates of over 50% and Gauteng and the Western Cape accounted for some 125000 candidates. What is of greater meaning is that even with each province having calculated its "success" on an inclusive count of all its candidates, it was not possible to hide the fact that the greatest disaster in the examinations occurred in the overcrowded, ill-equipped, ill-staffed and ill-situated schools ion the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden ghettos of the country.
Moreover, when the status of the "Senior Certificates" issued to successful candidates is scrutinized there emerges a disaster within a disaster. In Gauteng, for example, more than two-thirds of the pupils failed to pass with any sort of success: that is, if one uses as arbitrary measure the fact that two-thirds of the pupils who passed did not secure the 45% aggregate required for a "matriculation exemption". The tragedy goes deeper, however. For the past few years the education departments have worked on a system of passes based upon a "lower grade" (25%) pass in individual subjects. This has inflated pass rates. Pass rates ranging from 32% - 80% and all the official sophistry cannot conceal the accelerated debasement of educational standards. Neither fatuous praise, half-truths, clumsy lies nor statistics can hide the realities we are bound to face. As an example one might examine a little more closely some features of the 80% pass rate of the Western Cape's approximately 50000 candidates. Fewer than 20000 candidates offered mathematics as a subject. About 3000 wrote a higher grade examination; of these about 80% passed. Some 16000 candidates did the Standard Grade examination. Fewer than 40% passed it. The picture in a key subject, Physical Science, was worse.
Thus, when the results are closely scrutinised in each province they represent a truly appalling picture. It was only the Minister's and Provincial Ministers' dangerous ignorance of what the December 1996 results revealed that could cause them to express satisfaction of any kind. The youth of this country and the country itself have suffered another blow which begs description, a blow that bodes ill for the future of the victims, of this relentless debasement of education, and of the country.
While this mortification of human potential was being assessed more rods were being laid in pickle for the backs of the country's youth. That was being done by the very people who now have taken charge of education in the provinces and nationally.
Past disasters of the kind that has been analysed here have been recycled through the teacher-training colleges, bush colleges and other institutions of higher education. That was indeed one of the main aims of the Verwoerdian system of Christian National Education. Tragically, that process has not come to an end. The lack of schools, of equipment, of sufficient numbers of adequately-trained teachers and the siting of schools and colleges in anti-educational social environments will continue. On top of this, the very people who now are in charge of the administration of the segregated systems embarked upon a fourth stage of sacking, by several different means, tens of thousands of teachers, amongst whom there are very many with academic training, special skills and rich experience. This is presented as "right-sizing" staff numbers in pursuit of "equity" in the distribution of resources in education.
All the stories regarding "redeployment" of teachers from "over-staffed schools" to under-staffed ones hold as much truth as a colander might retain water.
The process of stripping the teaching corps is plainly and simply one of carrying out orders by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to cut expenditure on education, to raise pupil-teacher ratios to the notorious 40 for primary- and 35 for secondary-school levels; to make parents pay for most of their children's education and to cut compulsory, free-education to the bone. The TLSA has pointed this out for the past ten years. The Botha, de Klerk and Mandela governments have all hidden these facts from the country, but particularly from the immediate victims of the process - the pupils, parents and teachers.
It began with the slaughter of the number of teachers in the old House of Delegates department. It continued in the House of Assembly (HoA) Department, coupled with the introduction of Model C schools. It spread to both the HoA and House of Representatives (HoR) schools with the introduction of "voluntary early retirement" packages. Now the mass slaughter of teacher numbers is the great contribution of the present government to the trashing of education. "Redeployment" and "equity" were invented as convenient myths to conceal the basic plan. What made the process even more infamous, distasteful and dishonest was the willing collaboration of the SA Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu), the National Professional Teachers' Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) and the Cape Teachers' Professional Association (CTPA) in this process. Within the chambers of the Education Labour Relations Council they put their signatures to documents with which the provincial ministers and directors of education set about slashing the staffs at schools throughout the country.
The ten dummy parliaments in the old "homelands" carried out processes of deliberate, studied neglect of the "homelands" schooling systems. If there was a single redeeming feature in it all, it was the Transkei government's importation of nearly 2000 graduate and non-graduate professional teachers to upgrade teaching. Even this teaching corps is now teetering on the edge of destruction by the Eastern Cape government. There is no end to the ignominious aspects of what we face in 1997. The very teachers' bodies that signed the death warrants of twelve thousand colleagues who may not return to teaching are now whingeing that they were let down by the Education Departments, that few deployments were carried out. In the Western Cape, the Minister of Education through her Director has threatened to charge with misconduct and insubordination a dedicated, well-informed teacher of the highest integrity who not only stood against this bloody war on education but also, in alliance with parents, made abundantly clear the disasters that would follow - and have indeed followed - the implementation of the new policies.
Thus to the ruinous end to the school careers of most of those who reached Std 10 in 1996 has now been added the disasters resulting from the mindless policies of the Bengu ministry and its provincial appendages.
Upon the shoulders of those who have been left in the schools to defend education, not upon the Bengu regime, there rests a challenge of inordinate dimensions. The TLSA stands with them, with the parents, pupils and teachers, against the vandals who have set in motion yet another phase in the destruction of the democratisation and modernisation of education in this country.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL. 67 #1, OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE TEACHERS' LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, JANUARY - FEBRUARY 1997]
EDITOR: Mrs. H.N. Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
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