The Big Read: The measure of our misery

Like every December, you know it's a slow news month by the desperate headlines. A former Wits student leader, the Hitler-admiring one, calls the vice-chancellor "evil, the third force and uncircumcised at heart".

Yawn, this death by hyperbole. People coming to Hout Bay are "like stupid animals .tie them to a rope", says Vanessa Hartley, before there's nothing left of the place. Yet another racist Facebook rant. Did Ms Sparrow teach us nothing? Almost unnoticed in this toxic wasteland of everyday talk in South Africa is the real devastating news about our children's performance in maths and science when compared to other struggling countries.

Somebody needs to send a note of thanks to the government of Kuwait. Without them we would have been stone last among the nations in Grade 5 mathematics performance. Last in Grade 9 science, below even Egypt and Botswana, and second-last in Grade 9 maths - thank you Saudi Arabia. However, we are doing better than before, say the politicians and their paid consultants. Things are moving forward. Almost stone last, but that is good news. Right, 20 years into our democracy and this is good news? The definition of spin, said a political operator, is to tell people that what they just saw is not what they saw.

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study has lost all meaning in South Africa and continued participation is a waste of money. You cannot measure yourself out of misery. You take concrete actions and return to measurement 10 years from now. The reality is the needle has not moved appreciably despite two decades of effort. The study tells us what we already know. Most of our children perform below the grade level in maths and science: 61% of South African pupils lack the minimum competency in basic mathematics knowledge. Somebody should be held accountable. Don't hold your breath; this is South Africa.

So what lessons can we take from yet another comparative measure of our misery? If you want to do well, be born a girl into a middle-class home to parents who surround you with education resources and send you to a quality pre-school followed by a private school or a top fee-paying government school in either Gauteng or the Western Cape. What this means is that your life choices still depend more on the accident of your birth than the efforts of your government.

Moving around California's high-tech Silicon Valley these past months has filled me with despair. Here are tens of thousands of young people imagining a different world, producing apps, fighting climate change, launching start-ups, graduating from school and college, inventing education programmes for poor children. Brics countries like India send thousands of software engineers into this part of the world to create wealth and multiply opportunities for the next generation. These youths are not smarter than young people back home. What is different here is they do not disrupt classes, insult their education leaders and burn their libraries. When I read that groups of student leaders are meeting to plan next year's campus disruptions, I despair.

Forget universities. Our foundations of literacy and numeracy in the school system remain weak. The trends in the maths and science report tell us what we already know. The question is: Why has this problem still not been fixed in a country that spends more on education than its company in the bottom five nations?

We might not like what I saw in Singapore a few weeks ago, a Third World country turned into an economic powerhouse.

The story of Singapore - the top performer in the maths and science trends study - is one of strong and principled leadership in what was once a hopeless country. To change the school system for the poorest children we might very well need a benevolent dictator at the helm of government. By benevolent dictator I mean an uncompromising, incorruptible, commanding leader who puts an end to self-destructive politics. One other thing Singapore did was to embrace the best elements of colonial education and make it work; it did not violently "decolonise" the instruments of its liberation.

Without such leadership we will remain in the education swamp fighting with our past and destroying our future while the only ones who get ahead are the 1.3% of pupils who achieved at the "advanced level" of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.