SA's education system working against youth

You need more than a lousy Senior Certificate to make sense of the 2011 matric results. According to our minister of schools, the fact that the overall pass rate went up last year by 2.4 percentage points proves that all sorts of remedial actions and policy gerrymandering are working.

But no one outside the Department of Basic Education seriously believes our school system is working. It still seems many Eastern Cape teachers can't be fagged to get up and go to school in the morning - and that when they do, they don't exactly put their hearts and souls into grooming and guiding inquiring young minds. Three Limpopo schools achieved the tragic distinction of not producing a single matriculant between them, while across the country, maths and economics passes came down.

Then there is the fact that more than half the children who enter the school system get lost along the way, before they get anywhere near a matric exam. Grinding poverty and the demands of having to support a household run by an infirm grandparent or no adults at all bleed many pupils out of the system. Others go to such lousy schools and get such a lousy education that they soon figure out they're wasting their time.

Every year a few bright sparks pull off eight, 10, even 12 distinctions. Without exception, these young achievers deserve every bit of acclaim they have been getting. Many of these teenage heroes overcame appalling odds; one had no hands, some were blind, a few had cerebral palsy, many couldn't feed themselves properly.

I have not the slightest doubt that several thousand of these will go on to glittering careers, some will become celebrated surgeons, a few might one day find a cure for some dreaded disease. Who knows; one or two might in time even become newspaper columnists.

(For those of us of a certain age - who remember the day when distinctions were like hen's teeth - it's still hard to fathom, though, what it means when a fair-to-middling Model C pupil gets four or five distinctions, some of them in subjects the education authorities have only just invented.)

There are, of course, many brilliant exceptions but, by and large, our high school system is sitting on piles of bricks in the backyard with its engine out. It's broken. These days you get a matric certificate for passing three subjects with 40% and three others with 30%. If you've just got yourself a shiny new matric certificate, the sad reality is that employers aren't impressed; they're not going to employ you because you're going to need a lot more than 30% for macrame studies before you can add any kind of value to their business. And with labour legislation being what it is, they won't be able to get rid of you once they discover you're more interested in facebooking on your smartphone all day than actually doing any work.

When reporters ask the top performing matrics what they're planning to do next, they all say how they're going to study medicine or electrical engineering or English literature. You never, ever read any of them saying: "I want to become a boilermaker. My uncle Vusi is going to give me experience in his workshop and I'm going to study at nights for my trade tests. In 10 years' time I want to open my own business."

Not for a moment do I envy Angie Motshekga. The effects of Bantu education and endemic poverty on our schooling system are so enormous, so pervasive that most of us will not live to see the eradication of their impact on our youngsters' education.

The bulk of our pupils aren't equipped to get distinctions in history and biology but as much as they dress funny, play with their phones too much (and the white boys all need haircuts), I don't think our youth are that bad. Most of them are bright, ambitious and capable, even if their matric certificates aren't worth a bag of beans.

The bulk of our new matriculants will be wasting their time and someone else's money going to university. But there are heaps of training opportunities for people who can make and fix things. Artisans are paid small fortunes these days and if you can work a lathe in a local factory, you can work one anywhere. Many thriving, sustainable small businesses in this country are run by plumbers, electricians and toolmakers - not philosophy graduates.