The universal studying of maths is about producing a nation free from the shackles of oppression

Forty-five years after school learners took to the streets in Soweto and elsewhere on June 16, 1976, our basic education system is in trouble. This is due less to the challenges of funding, of the preparation of our teachers, of the lack of equipment, than to our failure to produce a social imagination for the education of our children that serves them well and serves South Africa. We have sadly failed the generation of 1976.

Around the world nations are shaped and reshaped at schools. They are places where social values and culture are developed and transmitted preparing young people for active engagement as citizens of complex, multi-layered societies.

It is at schools that the early seeds of global citizenship are sowed, when so many of the grand challenges facing humanity are simultaneously local and global. They place children on a path of lifelong learning. They inculcate scepticism, creativity, innovation, and help them develop the skills and competencies they need to navigate further learning, work, and leisure. Can we say that our schools play these roles?

At the beginning of every year, we are summoned as a nation to celebrate the results of the National Senior Certificate (NSC) exams; and celebrate we must the achievements of wonderfully talented, resilient young people. This is also an opportunity for the Minister and Department of Basic Education to exuberantly celebrate their “success”. And yet every year we agonise over the meaning of these results. Year after year we are awakened to the fact that the outcomes of the NSC exams in no way represent the quality or health of the basic education system.

As we cogitate over the key challenges, it must be the unforgivable leakage in the Grade 1 to Grade 12 pipeline that should bother us most. If we take the 2020 cohort, for every 100 children in Grade 2 in 2010, about 60 sat for the NSC exams and approximately 20 passed with a Bachelor Pass. Such appalling injustice every year to hundreds of thousands of young South Africans with massive collateral damage to society and the economy.

This is inextricably tied to the deeply racialised class-based inequalities that characterise the basic education system mirroring as it does one of the most unequal societies in the world. It is estimated that only 30% of the students in our school system receive decent educational experiences. If social justice is to be at heart of a national imagination, then schools must be at the epicentre of such an imagination.

At the same time that South Africa seeks to catch the new technology moment, we witness a steady decline in the number of students writing and passing maths in the NSC exams. More concerning is that in 2019 about 220 000 wrote the final exam and about 146 000 passed at a grade of 30% or more – which somehow is considered to be a good level to aim at. Distinctions were obtained by just 2% of these students. No more than 15% of the students that entered Grade 1 in 2008 passed the NSC maths exam with a pass mark of 30% or more and just 0.3% with distinction.

What is the meaning of this? More than 25 years after apartheid was eradicated, we are sadly all complicit in simply extending the Verwoerdian paradigm that not all human beings should study the subject. It is good for a few but not for the many.

Maths, in our context, is much more than a gateway course into many areas of higher study. The fact that hundreds of thousands of children every year are excluded from studying it is a direct form of oppression. It is a story finely interwoven into our colonial and apartheid histories.

The universal studying of maths is about producing a nation free from the shackles of oppression. It is about becoming a nation schooled in the skills of rational thought and logic, confident that it can contend with a future characterised by vast changes taking place at the human-Earth-technology nexus. It speaks to a nation confident in addressing a national rejuvenation. It is primarily a political project.

What are we to do? We need a national conversation about a new imagination for basic education leading to a new all-encompassing social compact that places our children at the centre. A conversation led by the president of the nation bringing in all branches of society, understanding that learning is a social activity.

The Department of Basic Education entrapped in a failed imagination cannot lead such a conversation. The imperatives of social justice, nation-building and social cohesion must shape the basic education system, for how else are we to build a national culture steeped in such rubrics?

Nelson Mandela, when he said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children”, was acutely aware of the way in which the treatment of children is a bellwether of the well-being of a society, with its future tied to the way it treats its most vulnerable, opening the way for the holistic flourishing of its children.

It is obvious that schools are at the very centre of this project. Let’s decisively free ourselves from the Verwoerdian paradigm.

* Professor Ahmed Bawa is the chief executive of Universities South Africa.

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL and Independent Media.