South Africans should consider how we spend money on education, what it costs and what we get out of it
Picture: iStock
The South African festive season is drawn out and exhaustingly competitive. It begins in mid-September when stores, typically with a panda in the name or logo, put the Christmas trees in the front. This reminds the big retailers to take the unsold Christmas cakes from 2008 out of cryostasis – with the first to do that winning the passive marketing award of being the subject of Sunday lunch’s “can you believe X already has Christmas things out?”.
Enter the retail pricing creep before Black Friday, when you walk past a bargain bin and can’t believe that there are still CDs for sale in the 2020s; Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey are still fighting to be your Christmas kitchen soundtrack. If you side with Mariah and have more than one kid, they’ll each try be the first to point out that Carey’s desire to build a toy-land all around the Christmas tree sounds remarkably like a toilet.
The season ends with the greatest competition of all, although it’s an internal one: how soon after the matric pass rate is announced can the DA announce the “real” matric pass rate?
Matric exam marking centres
This year, we seem to have a novel inclusion to the festive discourse – an inquiry no less. Why is the basic education DG visiting all 180-something marking centres personally? What does it cost the taxpayer? Is it worth the money?
Fair questions, but it’s a bit rich to put a director general on the subject of oversight in a department that spends about 16% of the national budget to prepare 30% of the population for unemployment. Teacher absenteeism isn’t a term we should be familiar with, yet it is. I’m sure there are several reasons for the rise in home schooling in recent years, but I can’t imagine that the high quality of public basic education is one of them.
Is education worth what we spend on it?
If we’re going to be asking whether a personal oversight by the DG to marking centres is worth the money, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t extend that question to something more impactful – is the whole exercise of education worth what we spend on it?
To be more precise, is the way we do it worth it. I don’t believe anybody would claim that it’s not worth spending public money to educate our kids just like nobody is saying that we shouldn’t be having oversight on matric marking. How we do it, what it costs and what we get out of it should be considered.
One cannot look at a R300 billion budget and ask whether we’re getting bang for our bucks on R1 million or R2 million of it while ignoring the rest. The rest is probably more important than whether a person is driving around the country, somehow managing 180 stops along the way.
Fine. Let’s ask that person how much time they get to spend at each centre and whether it’s worth it for them and the public. Let’s also ask whether they’re doing the remaining parts of their job or if they’re too busy gallivanting. Is that really anything remotely near the top of our concerns regarding education? If anything, at least they’re showing some sort of commitment. That’s more than can be said for so many other aspects of the system.
Have the questions if you must. Let’s just not pretend like getting to the bottom of this is going to solve any real issues in education. More importantly, if you’re willing to open the question of whether something that we spend money on in terms of education is worth it for the taxpayer, you need to be open to asking that question about the entire system.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be educating our kids. It means we need to be honest about how we go about it. The real question is, are our children learning what will be good 4 dem in there foocha?
