Schooling in South Africa needs a serious rethink

Our constitution, in section 29, enshrines everyone’s right to a basic education, including adult basic education. It also provides for ‘further education, which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible’. Let us assume that the initial requirement means no more than conventional literacy and numeracy – simple reading, writing and arithmetic. What “further education” entails is a matter for speculation.

Ninety percent of SA’s 11m children start Grade 1 for compulsory schooling up to Grade 9. Under 40% pass ‘matric’ (Grade 12) with or without exemption from a university pre-matriculation examination. However, institutions constantly have to address the problem that ‘matric’ isn’t a good or uniform indicator of academic success – for example, medical schools are currently planning their own midyear selection examination.

Before the introduction of compulsory primary schooling in 1870, 90% of British children ‘enjoyed’ over five years of schooling. Even after a pioneering century of industrial growth and imperial expansion, in 1914 only one out of twenty English children went to secondary school, and one in seven in Scotland. Every parent and child wants basic or primary education. The British example shows that such brief general education of all pre-teenagers suffices – or at least used to suffice – to sustain rapid economic growth. Naturally, the quality of that primary education is crucially important and the late Professor EG West found ample evidence that nineteenth and twentieth English people were highly literate. Professor West concluded that this result was achieved because until 1870 all schooling was private and there was only limited subsidisation of schooling from taxes.

With an average 6 years of formal education, South Africa is much like other developing countries, but we’re certainly not getting value for money. The education budget consumes R69 billion of taxes annually, a huge proportion (nearly a quarter) of the national budget. That’s about 5.7% of GDP and R1,533 per head of the population. Tanzania spends half that for its children to acquire 50% better reading skills. But perhaps we can keep blaming apartheid for a while longer.

Rich countries average more like 10 years of formal education. But is mass education beyond the basics merely a ‘nice-to-have’ – a luxury indulgence – or is it an essential for a growing modern economy? The biggest and most successful modern economy of all provides an average 12 years of education, but often in America ‘Johnny still can’t read.’ Yet just look how Johnny can produce!

For a country’s economic growth, the question of distribution of skills arises. For example, would, or does, a farm-worker or manual labourer benefit even from basic schooling, in his capacity as worker and wage-earner? Solely towards national prosperity, is a particular level of adult literacy really needed for national prosperity? Or is demand for labour more important?

Well, the numbers are available from the World Bank for inspection, and scattergrams reveal absolutely no correlation of national illiteracy rates with economic growth. In rich countries with per capita incomes over US$10,000, illiteracy falls below 12%. Slovenia, Hong Kong and Bahrain, for example, combined varying illiteracy of 0.40%, 6.5% and 12% with respectable compound growth rates of 2%, 2.4% and 2.6% during the nineties.

At the other extreme, poor countries with incomes below US$3,000 suffer 5% to 60% adult illiteracy and their growth ranges mostly from -1% to 4%, again with no correlation. For example, Bangladesh, India, El Salvador and Sri Lanka achieved similar good compound growth rates of 3%, 3.6%, 2.2% and 3.2% with dissimilar 60%, 42%, 21% and 8% adult illiteracy.

South Africa’s peer-group of middle-income ($3,000 – $10,000) countries can all claim under 25% adult illiteracy, also without any correlation with growth. Compare three neighbours with much the same average $4,000 incomes – South Africa’s 14.4% illiteracy and slightly sub-zero per capita compound growth, Mauritius’ 15.2% illiteracy and 4% growth, and Botswana’s 22% illiteracy and 2.7% growth.

These comparisons belie any claim that South Africa needs greater general literacy or numeracy for faster economic growth. On the contrary, they suggest that reducing educational spending and achievement would not harm growth. In fact, if converted into reduced taxation, that reduction in government spending would help growth. Of SA’s annual million school-leavers, only 29% of the black majority, or 36% of black matrics, have found jobs in the over-regulated formal sector of the economy. Whatever they’ve learned, the formal economy is not currently benefiting from the bulk of that educational investment.

With the planned extension of free schooling to both the poorest 20% of pupils and families on welfare, disability and social grants, 40-60% of poor pupils may be ‘enjoying’ free schooling by 2006. Funding will flow from fee-paying middle-class parents and general taxation, at an undoubtedly enormous ‘opportunity-cost’ in alternative consumption foregone. But the ministry is politically-driven rather than responsive to consumer demand or a need for greater general growth or prosperity. So let us hope, against the odds, that this and various other well-intended welfare measures will ‘first do no harm’ rather than actually driving per-capita incomes down. Perhaps, as so often under apartheid, providentially-rising commodity prices will mask the damage done by bad policies.

Nowadays even socialists cannot escape the reality that governments everywhere make inefficient and wasteful business managers. The market can always provide desired goods and services better, quicker, cheaper, and non-coercively. Unfortunately this version of ‘public good’ doesn’t appeal to officials who prefer addressing government failure by throwing more tax money at every problem.

So we are left to hope that the UK approach of privatising the refurbishment, building and maintenance of public schools will catch on. This lets the treasury boost service delivery within budget, allows school managers to focus on educational tasks, and leaves the physical infrastructure in the capable hands of paid contractors.

And if government is really serious about improving the quality and relevance of schooling as rapidly as possible it will remove all impediments to the establishment of private schools and introduce a voucher or capitation funding system to give poorer children the opportunity to attend private or better-quality government schools. Evidence worldwide points to competition between education providers and choice in education, and especially free choice of curriculum, as the keys to unlock excellence in education.

Author: Dr Jim Harris is a freelance researcher and writer. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement to the author. The views expressed in the article are the author’s and they are not necessarily shared by the members of the Free Market Foundation.

FMF Feature Article\26 August 2003