In Daily Maverick on January 2, Muhammad Coovadia, an intern counselling psychologist, offered a forceful critique of South Africa’s annual celebration of the matric pass rate.
To applaud these results, he argues, is “to become complicit in a tragic masquerade” that disguises systemic failure in the language of progress.
According to him, celebrating the pass rate becomes akin to admiring “the golden paint freshly rolled onto the hull of a ship that is already taking on water” or “tossing confetti onto the deck of a Titanic that has been sinking for years”.
The force of the Titanic metaphor, however, should not prevent closer scrutiny of what it reveals and what it conceals.
The original disaster exposed the limits of early twentieth-century technology and the dangers of mistaking technical sophistication for human mastery. Yet, it was also a vessel of privilege. Its passengers were overwhelmingly wealthy, buffered from the structural deprivation that shapes contemporary South Africa. The education system now carries a very different cargo: learners bearing the cumulative effects of historical dispossession, racialised inequality and economic exclusion.
These legacies continue to manifest in overcrowded classrooms, uneven teacher training, language barriers and stark disparities in resources.
The danger lies not only in system failure but also in reform strategies that overestimate what schools can achieve without addressing the social and institutional conditions under which teaching and learning occur.
A related article appeared in Daily Maverick on January 14, when Esmé van Deventer, an education anthropologist, contrasted the assessment practices of the Department of Basic Education (DBE) with those of the Independent Examinations Board (IEB).
She argues that IEB examinations enjoy greater credibility, citing their emphasis on higher-order questioning, stronger cognitive habits and better university outcomes among IEB students.
The implication is that assessment design, rather than broader context, is the decisive factor in educational quality. Comparing the performance of just over 17 000 learners, most of whom were educated in favourable conditions, with that of nearly a million educated across profoundly unequal contexts is a distortion of reality.
From a policy perspective, this conclusion is too neat. In the Further Education and Training phase, the IEB does not operate outside the national curriculum framework. Its subject guidelines are aligned to the outcomes of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (Caps).
Furthermore, Umalusi quality assures both public and private high-stakes examinations, including question papers, school-based assessment and marking, through rigorous moderation and standardisation processes benchmarked against the same Caps-defined cognitive demands and levels of difficulty.
These benchmarks determine eligibility for the National Senior Certificate, a qualification that holds significant social and economic value for millions of South Africans across race, class and schooling sectors and one that compares favourably with equivalent qualifications internationally.
Added to this, her comparison implies that public schools, including those with decades-long traditions of excellence, are inherently unable to compete with private schools and that their results are therefore inferior. This is a misleading inference. There are numerous private schools that choose to write the DBE examinations despite receiving no government subsidy or state-funded teaching posts. They could easily have opted out of the public system, yet they continue to place their trust in the public examination framework. Their learners’ results secure admission to world-class universities such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford.
I contest the assumption of total failure. Even in poor and neglected communities with limited choices, there are committed teachers and determined learners who continue to invest meaningfully in education. In many such communities, education, and the National Senior Certificate in particular, is regarded as a gateway to the restoration of dignity and opportunity.
What both writers overlook is the extraordinary commitment of teachers, learners and parents in under-resourced contexts.
In a school in Umlazi, KwaZulu-Natal, for example, teachers had already begun preparing matriculants by January 5, and routinely teach over weekends. Yet such achievements are frequently dismissed as insignificant, precisely because they do not fit dominant narratives of collapse.
It is also important to recognise that a curriculum such as Caps defines minimum requirements. It does not prevent schools, teachers or learners from exceeding them.
None of this denies the profound structural challenges facing South African education. They are plainly visible in overcrowded classrooms, persistently weak literacy and numeracy outcomes and international assessments that consistently place South African learners near the bottom of global rankings.
While South Africa allocates a relatively high proportion of its national budget to education, the core problem is not funding alone. It lies in a curriculum that is ambitious relative to classroom realities, combined with a teacher education system insufficiently prepared to support its effective implementation.
Celebrating or condemning examination results in isolation risks misdiagnosing the problem. A more productive response would prioritise curriculum pacing that reflects classroom realities, sustained investment in teacher development and assessment practices that privilege depth of understanding over compliance.
Without such alignment, debates about pass rates, credibility and rigour will continue to generate more heat than light, leaving the structural foundations of educational inequality largely untouched.
Improved learning outcomes depend on strong foundations. Fewer concepts should be taught, learning should be carefully sequenced and mastery should be secured before progression.
South Africa’s curriculum, particularly in the early grades, is content-heavy and fast-paced. Learners are often expected to engage with complex material before they can read fluently or grasp basic mathematics. Teachers are pressured to “cover” content, even as learners fall progressively further behind.
The illusion of progress persists because access is too often mistaken for learning. Many learners are promoted year after year without mastering foundational skills.
By grade 10, the gaps have widened to the point where meaningful learning becomes nearly impossible, and those who cannot cope exit the system altogether.
Curriculum reform cannot occur in isolation. In a rapidly evolving technological era, teachers, beginning in the foundation and intermediate phases, require deep subject knowledge, as textbook content is quickly rendered obsolete. This, in turn, demands sustained professional support from subject advisers who should not merely monitor curriculum compliance but be highly skilled specialists capable of fostering continuous disciplinary development.
Simplifying the curriculum is not a lowering of standards, but it is a necessary condition for achieving them. Until such alignment is realised, neither celebration nor condemnation, however morally charged, will meaningfully change what
happens in classrooms across the country.
- Lewis was a senior curriculum planner at the Western Cape Education Department, a lecturer in education at the University of Pretoria and is currently Research Fellow at the University of South Africa.
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