Try, the beloved country. So now you can do your matric over two years. Why stop there? Let's allow pupils to write the Grade 12 final examination over six years - one subject per year. If the goal is to sink so low that it is impossible for anyone to fail, hey, make the exam as easy as possible. One subject in Grade 8, one in Grade 9 - you get the picture - and one after Grade 12. That way, everyone passes, we hope.This is what we're good at as South Africans - we scrape the bottom of the barrel and then have the audacity to claim victory. What country with any self-respect celebrates its economy narrowly averting junk status? A more appropriate response would have been to lament the fact that we even got into that perilous situation. But we pride ourselves on our ignorance - "Look," I have heard politicians excitedly proclaim, "In this country you can go to the top without a high school education!" True, so why bother?Do not for one moment believe that this pandering to our lowest aspirations has anything to do with justice for the weak. Nope. This is about cramming in as many dumb policy proposals in an election season in the hope that your party's chances at the polls improve.What is the purpose of this terminal school examination? It is a test of how much you know and how well you know it after completing 12 years of schooling. Can we, the tax-paying public, guarantee that you are literate and numerate and in possession of the basic skills required for further education and training after spending so much time in formal education? If so, the department hands you a certificate of competence, confirmation that you have completed the journey. The Latin word for curriculum is currere, meaning a race run, the completion of a course of study. In this country, you can run forever even if you forget what the original purpose of the race was.If I may stretch this analogy: Think of an 800m athlete who has to run twice around the track having failed to meet the expected standard after the first 400m. They stop the race, send him back to the starting point, and tell him to try again until the struggling athlete is ready to do the next 400m. Ridiculous, right? For the goal of the 800m is to circle the race track twice as a sign of accomplishment in the desired time. And you cannot fix the last 100m of this middle-distance event by putting all effort into the last sprint - in other words, fix the foundations of learning in the first three to five grades and you will not have to come up with these desperate schemes in the final grades of high school. Will politicians ever learn?It is already so difficult to fail in our schools with the low standard set for passing subjects and the escape clause for those poorly taught in mathematics - something called mathematical literacy. Children boast of attaining high marks in life orientation, something a good parent should be doing. But that is us - we lead in the race to the bottom.Imagine a country in which the pass rate is 65% and all high schools give children the option of advanced mathematics. Imagine a South Africa in which no student passes Grade 12 unless they can design an Excel spreadsheet, prepare a real-life business plan and develop an app which addresses a social problem. Imagine in our country that every child is required to write a long essay on a compelling topic - like "What is the use of the South African parliament?"- in which novel argument and powerful logic carry 80% of the assessment. Dream on.We have become so used to swimming in this cesspool of diminished expectations that low standards have become the new normal. A man called Elijah from the Department of Education defended the matric-over-two-years nonsense with this gem of self-deception: "The idea is to support those learners that are gifted differently." I once read in the Bible about a man called Elijah who "walked with God and was no more for he was taken away". I hope it's the same bloke...