EDUCATION-SOUTH AFRICA: Attempts to Close the Race Gap

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Farah Khan

JOHANNESBURG, Jan 2 2002 (IPS) - Every year, at about this time, the newspapers are filled with stories about young people who succeed in graduating from secondary school, against the odds.

All 52 students at the Ithuteng Trust School in Soweto, a township in Johannesburg, passed their matric, amidst celebration.

The milestone is one that successful young candidates of all races across the country celebrate, but for them, it was an almost miraculous rite of passage.

The 52 students each have a troubled young history; of either abuse, rape, abandonment, prostitution, gangsterism and domestic violence, in addition to being poor.

By putting in place life-skills training and offering them a sanctuary, the school is a symbol of what can be done if development resources are injected into a community.

For them and for the country the national matric results are a reminder of how far South Africa has come since the end of apartheid in 1994, but also of how far it still has to travel.

Education is a bellwether sector because one of the cornerstones of apartheid was the system of Bantu education, with its self-declared aim of turning black people to the “hewers of wood” and the “drawers of water”.

Now with attention from a democratic state, things are turning around. The matric results are slowly improving and these are held to be a symbol of improvements in the general education system.

This year the pass rate was just over 61 percent of the 478,000 students who sat the exam, up 3.8 percentage points on last year’s figure.

Both Education Minister Kader Asmal and President Thabo Mbeki welcomed the improvements saying they were a step in the right direction.

Now the challenge falls on improving the rate of university passes that students achieve. Only 15 percent of those who passed achieved results good enough to give them a shot at a university entrance. Even fewer will register at technical colleges.

If the medium-term is to close the gap between historically white and black education – government has only managed to bring the gap down by half. Over nine in 10 schools still do not have libraries or science laboratories, while one in four did not have toilets.

Asmal said that pupil teacher ratios were getting smaller and the numbers of schools declared “unfit for education” was in decline.

But globalisation has changed the South African labour market, meaning that a matric is no longer sufficient for young people to find a job.

Whereas in the early 1990s, secondary education was enough to secure at least a manufacturing or trade job for a young person, this is no longer the case, according to research by Haroon Bhorat, the director of the Development Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town.

South Africa dropped industrial tariffs rapidly after 1994, sending sectors of its manufacturing industry into a downward spiral as cheaper imports hit these shores.

In addition, as gold lost its lustre as a store of wealth and central banks sold their stocks, this key commodity is contributing less and less to gross domestic product (gdp).

From around 1993, the labour market began to shift and now reflect a “skills bias”, where highly skilled workers benefited from the growth in the jobs market.

“The South African labour market is mimicking international labour demand patterns. There is a growing demand for workers at the top-end and decreasing preference for employees at the bottom end,” says Bhorat.

The downgrading of matric by the jobs market is evident in youth research by the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE) carried out in 2000. A survey sample of 2,500 representative youth found that 70 percent of matriculants were unemployed.

The figure fell to 41 percent once a post-matric qualification was achieved. “African youth who have a matriculation certificate do not appear to have significantly improved their chances of getting a job,” according to the CASE study.

The study suggests that youth unemployment is at 62 percent of an estimated five million economically active youth.

Sadly, one in five young people surveyed felt they would never get a job and one third had never had a job.

CASE’s survey suggests joblessness among youth has grown since 1996, when the Census of that year measured youth unemployment at 41 percent.