TOM EATON | The class of 2024 has its work cut out, but spare a thought for the education minister

As the class of 2024 sits down to write its final exams, it seems an appropriately bookish moment to remember the true meaning of “matriculation”, a word that comes to us from the late Latin “matriculare”, or “South African journalists not understanding the difference between percentages ad percentage points”.

I don’t blame them, of course. Most of us who ended up in the media did so because we were bad at maths at school, and any guidance counsellor will tell you that being numerically illiterate limits you to just two possible career paths: being a writer or a senior ANC cabinet minister.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that certain corners of our media do tend to have peculiar convulsions around the matric exams, whether fumbling percentages or producing the spectacle we’ll see in January, where the front two pages quote politicians telling us that things have never been better while the next two pages quote experts revealing just how bad they really are.

Being neither a politician nor an education expert, I can’t speak with confidence on either. I can’t even speak from experience.

I see a lot of older people worrying about how much time the younglings spend on their phones, but if I knew I was going to grow up in a world run by fascist AI algorithms, I’d also want to make it very public that my primary and most intense relationship was with a machine.

When I was frantically cramming for matric, 30 years ago this year, there were only two great questions in the world: what was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, and how did it involve the left-hand motor rule? My ambitions extended no further than passing maths on Writer Grade (two levels below Standard Grade) and then, perhaps, one day, going to work for a decent boss.

Today’s teens aren’t even sure if they’re going to end up with a human boss. I see a lot of older people worrying about how much time the younglings spend on their phones, but if I knew I was going to grow up in a world run by fascist AI algorithms, I’d also want to make it very public that my primary and most intense relationship was with a machine.

Of course, some things haven’t changed, least of all the criticisms of the essential yet strangely fluid concept of schooling. For some, it remains a very long psychometric test designed by capitalism to identify those people who are the keenest to be rewarded for hard work with ribbons, badges and certificates rather than money.

For others, it’s still a miracle. We are right to keep debating the form and function of primary and secondary education, but the fact that the whole planet gets its bounciest, moodiest and noisiest inhabitants to sit down for hours at a time and learn things — some of which are vital for our future — is a feat that still astounds me.

Having said all that, however, South Africa is changing, and our education system needs to keep up.

Twenty years ago, for example, the country’s economy was based on manufacturing, retail and finance. Today, the three largest pillars of the economy are whichever law firm is about to win another case against Dali Mpofu, oligarchs from Moscow laundering their otherwise unspendable roubles, and investigative journalists.

(Admittedly, this last group are paid in grateful tweets, or, if they work for Naspers, recyclable straws from the office canteen, but they all still pay tax so the point stands.)

Clearly, we need a new set of skills to tackle this changing reality, and I don’t just mean maths and science. The collapse of Johannesburg, for example, will need a new cadre of people with elite language skills, whether they are city managers announcing that not having water is the hot new environmental trend sweeping many of the world’s cities, or estate agents excitedly explaining that knee-deep potholes are a unique homage to the city’s mining heritage.

Yes, the class of 2024 has its work cut out for it. But as stressed as the nation’s matriculants are right now, spare a thought for new education minister Siviwe Gwarube as she frantically tries to put together a strategy around the results.

At first glance you might assume that she’d be sitting pretty right now. She’s only been in the job a little under four months, which means these exams, and the results they produce, are happening despite her appointment to Cyril Ramaphosa’s cabinet.

Come the second week of January, however, she will be the one announcing the results to the nation, which puts her in something of a pickle.

If the pass mark is up, nobody will believe it, mainly because we’ve been watching the ANC fire up the old steam-powered Inflate-O-Matic result-conjuring computer for years, pumping out the sort of results you’d expect from a Zimbabwean election presided over by Thabo Mbeki, even as South African children steadily lost the ability to read.

That’s a problem for Gwarube, who not only won’t be able to take any credit for an improved pass rate, but will also be seen to be using the ANC’s dodgy calculators.

On the other hand, if the pass rate drops, the ANC (and MK Party and EFF) will forget all about how reality works and will announce it as the DA’s first major failure in government.

No, Gwarube’s only option is to keep the figure exactly the same as last year. That, or speak to the country like a grown-up, which would be so shocking and new that we might all run away screaming.

For now, though, let’s hope that our grade 12s can keep calm, do their best, and above all, be nice to their phones.