Education the key to fixing inequality
He is adamant that offering high-quality education to every child, not only the rich, is the key to a fairer South African society.
MBOMBELA – PENTalks, the first of its kind hosted by Penryn, saw statistician Dr Nic Spaull cause jaws to drop with hard-hitting facts contributing to inequality in SA last week.
“What an awesome experience. It feels great to be contributing in our small way to finding the solution to a national crisis,” said one of the guests, Ron Chanetsa.
Spaull highlighted what we should be focusing on for the next 10 years. He is a member of the Research on Socio-Economic Policy team at Stellenbosch University, which analyses the data that informs South Africa’s education policies. Spaull said there are not enough people in the country who can interrogate problems in empirically rigorous ways, which means that all too often opinions or small local studies make policy. He hopes to change this.
This guru lives his life by German statistician Andreas Schleicher’s words: “Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.”
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He is adamant that offering high-quality education to every child, not only the rich, is the key to a fairer South African society.
His master’s thesis on equity and efficiency in the country’s primary schools showed that far too many South African pupils are functionally illiterate and functionally innumerate.
His work not only highlighted how flawed and unequal our education system is, it also resonated in international circles when a version was published this year in the prestigious International Journal of Educational Development.
When Spaull visits schools that are so neglected they do not even have toilets, and when he is repeatedly confronted with shocking statistics about underperformance, he does not despair, he gets angry. This is what motivates him to continue his work as a lecturer, academic and researcher at large because, if you do not truly understand the data about low and unequal performance, Spaull said, you cannot fix the problem.
