Matric: success, or perpetuating inequality?

AS THE euphoria around the matric 2025 results cools down, the focus turns to university admissions.

- EDWIN NAIDU

But the burning question over the public versus private education debate remains. One has to ask whether the elite Independent Examinations Board (IEB) schooling system is better equipped to give one’ child a better head start in life than the current National Senior Certificate (NSC) public system?

Despite massive transformative shifts aimed at redress and inclusion, the annual noise around the matric gives one the impression that the system continues to perpetuate the apartheid goals. On the stage at the MTN auditorium, the Government of National Unity (GNU) Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, celebrated the top achievers. Ditto these celebrations throughout the country as the Education MECs celebrated the cream of the crop in provincial public schools. The same scenario played out at private schools as IEB announced the results.

Beaming parents, varsities scrambling for the best, learners brimming with enthusiasm over their bright futures. Why celebrate the cream of the crop when most learners who have sat the 2025 matric exams in public schools are still mired in poverty and have finished their schooling unemployed with little prospects?

Gwarube did not mention those who failed the education system on Monday, when the results were announced. At the IEB celebrations, they talked only about those with distinctions too, which includes the majority of their learners.

When former president Thabo Mbeki spoke of two nations in one country, he meant a relatively prosperous, developed, white-dominated “first nation,’ and a larger, poorer, underdeveloped black “second nation,’ divided by vast economic and infrastructural inequality, a stark legacy of apartheid that persists despite democracy.