Lessons unlearned: the hidden costs of SA’s public education

IN SOUTH Africa, the bitter irony of education is that a certificate often signals neither mastery nor mobility. Each year, thousands of matriculants emerge from underfunded schools with qualifications that cannot secure them work or dignity.

- NOMVULA ZELDAH MABUZA

The OECD reports that nearly 39% of young South Africans with secondary schooling remain unemployed, a reality that mocks the promise of liberation. Three decades ago, economist Thomas Sowell exposed the deceptions of American education: grade inflation, union dominance and ideological capture that prized access over competence. South Africa today represents an even harsher version of those illusions.

Our system, celebrated for mass access, hides a deeper truth: access without outcomes chains the poor more tightly than exclusion. What appears as misfortune is, on closer inspection, a careful orchestration of incentives and neglect. From apartheid’s deliberate miseducation to democratic South Africa’s emphasis on symbolic transformation, education has often been wielded as a political instrument rather than a liberator.

To interrogate this deception, we must look beyond statistics into the incentives, histories and philosophies that sustain mediocrity. Only then can education be reclaimed as a tool for emancipation, not dependency. South Africa's education system carries the legacies of two powerful forces: apartheid’s engineered underdevelopment and post-1994 initiatives that blurred the line between access and quality. Mergers of colleges, diluted standards and a pass threshold of 30% created a mirage of progress while leaving foundational skills unattended. The data is unforgiving.

The 2025 PIRLS results reveal that 81% of Grade 4 learners cannot read for meaning. Media Monitoring Africa reports that 96% of public schools are overcrowded, while teacher absenteeism hovers at 10-15%. World Bank data confirms a real-term decline in per-learner education spending. Tertiary outcomes mirror these failures: over 42% of secondary graduates remain unemployed and nearly half of university entrants drop out in their first year.