TOM EATON | So what if half a million kids are dumped? It’s just numbers, like the pass mark

It was genuinely delightful being on social media on Wednesday as South African parents posted pictures of their little ones heading off to Grade 1 like a herd of baby goats running off into a field of flowers.

Of course, some of the goats were less excited than others. Young children are more finely attuned to flimflam than adults and one or two of the younglings seemed to have figured out that this whole school thing was clearly a trap.

Certainly, most of the Grade 2s and 3s are in for a very rude shock. Consider the poor nephew of journalist Lynsey Chutel, who, she tweeted, had “started grade one in 2020, so all he’s ever known is interrupted pandemic-era school. I’ll let y’all know how it goes when he finds out school is actually a Monday to Friday thing.”

Yes, a great many young lives are about to change in all sorts of dramatic ways. But some things remain reassuringly the same, such as the apparently eternal presence of Angie Motshekga, beginning her 14th year as the minister of Basically Shit Education, wagging her finger at those who unfairly claim her ministry is a dumpster fire rather than an entirely normal dumpster that is merely smoking.

Briefing the press this week, Motshekga attacked nasty myths about the matric pass mark, which, like certain grades in South African schools, are “being repeated year after year”.

Tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of SA’s 400,000 teachers don’t have a basic understanding of their own subjects, or of educational theory or methods in general. We can’t identify those teachers because the ANC and its favourite unions have made school inspectors extinct.

According to Motshekga, it is a nasty lie that children only need to get 30% overall to pass matric and, as someone who failed maths on the higher grade, I feel I am no position to doubt her arithmetic.

In fact, listening to her reiterate the true requirements — that candidates need to get 40% for their home language, 30% for the language in which they’re being taught, 40% for two other subjects and 30% for three — I am entirely open to the possibly that the minimum overall pass mark is much, much higher than 30%, perhaps as high as 32% or even 34%.

But that’s not really the point, is it? I mean, if we’re at the absurd point where ministers are trying to draw firm distinctions between pass marks of 30% and slightly more than 30% then the difference is absolutely meaningless. It doesn’t matter if it’s 33% or 35% or even 38%, because if these are the terms of the debate, then all we’re debating is whether Motshekga’s ministry should be razed to the ground and ploughed over with salt, or whether we save the salt for something more worthwhile.

Half of the children who started Grade 1 this week will not reach Grade 12.

Tens of thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of SA’s 400,000 teachers don’t have a basic understanding of their own subjects, or of educational theory or methods in general.

We can’t identify those teachers because the ANC and its favourite unions have made school inspectors extinct.

But what’s really important, folks, is that we need to stop perpetuating that upsetting myth about the 30% pass mark. Seriously. It’s hurtful and it’s wrong. So let’s just stop it and let Angie Motshekga get on with the essential job of overseeing the dumping of another 500,000 teenagers onto the side of the road.