S.African claim of 62.5% high school pass rates 'is a lie'

The South African Institute for Race Relations accuses the government of lying when claiming that 62.5% of the grade-eleven pupils had passed their exams this year - it was only 36,2%. And this is 'no better than the apartheid-Bantu' school system...

The SAIRR says this after they had examined all the available documentation about the 2008 high school examination results, noting that the more accurate pass rate for the 920,716 grade-eleven pupils in 2007 was 36,2%. Only one out of every ten of these matric pupils moreover, had obtained examination results which were good enough to qualify them for a tertiary-level education. These glaring discrepancies were discovered by the institute when examining the education department's own high school attendance statistics for 2007 's grade eleven pupils with the 2008 examination results. The education department, asked to comment on the accusation, said it was 'still studying the SAHRR report', and would only be able to comment formally later. A total of 920,716 pupils were in Grade eleven in 2007 and only 64% of them even wrote their exams last year -- of these, only 333,681, or 36,2%, had actually obtained a high school certificate. Moreover, only 20.2% of these successful matriculants were qualified to apply for a tertiary-level, university education. "The percentage of 36,2% as a pass rate is a much more accurate indication than the minister of education's 62,5% claim,' said managing head of the SAIRR, Frans Cronjé. Their findings also were that only 107,462 -- or 20,2% of all the successful matriculants were good enough to gain university-admission rights. "When one compares this with the 2007 's Grade 11 pupils, this means that only 11,7% of all these pupils -- one out of ten -- had been good enough to go to university. To pass South African high school with a certificate, pupils only need 40% pass rates in three subjects, and 30% in three other subjects. For university-access level results, pupils must have pass rates of 50% in four subjects and not have any failure rates of 50% in two subjects. The Institute also slammed the educational authorities for 'misleading' the voters when claiming that such low university-level admission levels would ever be able to prepare pupils sufficiently for a university- or tertiary-level education. Educational crisis Cronje says these very low pass rates also are the country's largest-single crisis which must be addressed most urgently by the African National Congress government. "South Africa will never become a succesful, industrialised economy if the educational authorities continue to deliver such unacceptable results,' he warned. The authorities, he says, also are responsible for the future development of the nation's next generation - and thus are also curbing the educational opportunities of the country's young -- and especially those for black youths, by lying about their examination results. The results are no better than "Bantu-education' was during apartheid "These educational results aren't any better than the apartheid-era's 'Bantu-education' (the ethnic-language-based education system, practiced during apartheid between 1948 and 1994). see "The current reality is that economic equality won't be obtained for future generations, especially for black children, with such poor educational results,' he warned. What is 'apartheid-education"? During apartheid, a system of ethnic-education was launched from 1981, when the then-government made education compulsory for all race groups. Under this system, the first two years of the primary-level educational system always emphasized home-language education to ease the child into being taught in other languages such as English later -- i.e. in the country's eleven ethnic groups had their own primary schools, teaching in home languages such as Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, North-Sotho, South Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Venda, Ndebele, Afrikaans and English. The country's two official languages then were English and Afrikaans. After the fourth year, black schools were given a choice in which of the official languages they wanted the children to be educated in: most choose English, while the country's two official languages all were still required courses for the English-and Afrikaans-speakers in the highest two high school levels. In 1981, there were only 202 school for blacks. A large school-building programme was launched, and they also built eight universities and ten technikons for black students, subsidised by taxpayer funds. In addition there also were the world-famous University of South Africa (UNISA) distance education degrees - through which imprisoned black leaders such as Nelson Mandela, could receive their university education in jail. Many students from other African countries also enrolled in this university and obtained their degrees from South Africa -- at the height of apartheid. By 1984, when the black SA official population stood at 18-million, there already were 3,150,000 black pupils in primary education, 790,110 in secondary schools and 53,957 in tertiary education and hundreds of new schools were built as rapidly as the authorities could afford them. Black graduates also were encouraged to take teaching degrees so that they could move into the educational system within four years. By 1994, more than 85,000 black teachers were already employed in the SA educational system and thus were also rapidly replacing the large number of Afrikaans-speaking, English-speaking and Indian teachers who had up to that point, been teaching in the black-languages educational system. The emphasis on black mother-tongue education was completely dropped in the highest high school levels and at the university-level educational systems, where the lingua franca was English or Afrikaans, depending on which university was attended. Opponents of this system referred to this as 'Bantu-education'.