FOR most Eastern Cape school children, education is not worth the paper it's written on. I'm not talking about the National Senior Certificate, as matric will be known from 2008.

Even though the release of the matric results is almost as exciting as Christmas, using the Grade 12 results to measure educational achievement is about as useful as judging a parcel by its paper wrapping. It may tell you something about the contents, but not nearly enough. It's what goes on underneath that matters.

To be fair, our education is not all bad. Our policies are mainly progressive, and where they err, which they do, it's often on the side of being too naively idealistic to be workable. That's better than the frankly vicious policies of the past that contributed so much to our present educational mess.

Sometimes the new policies work quite well. Almost every child, girl or boy, gets the basic compulsory education promised in the Constitution. That's unusual - especially the gender equity bit - in developing countries. And although some children do drop out, nearly 87 percent eventually achieve Grade 9. The proportion of the population achieving nine years of education is increasing steadily over time. That's something to celebrate.

It's just a pity about the quality of the achievement. In the first place, we're way behind internationally. In 2002, nearly 9000 Grade 8 students from a range of South African schools participated in the third Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Of the 50 participating countries, South Africa scored the lowest - worse than Ghana and Botswana, and far below the international average. The Eastern Cape just squeaked past Limpopo, the lowest-achieving province.

Those whose children attend ex-Model C schools with 100 percent matric pass rates have no room to smirk. We are all falling behind, not just the faceless poor and rural.

Consider this: only a sprinkling of top South African pupils managed to reach the level of the average pupils from Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong and Japan. So, even if your children are the best in this country, they'll fade into the background in the East.

TIMSS was not an anomaly.

We also compare badly with our often poorer neighbours. Botswana, Swaziland, and even Mozambique did better than we did in the regional Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality II studies, which investigated literacy and numeracy in 14 southern and eastern African countries.

According to the South African report, over 60 percent of Eastern Cape Grade 6 children could read at only a basic or lower level. Nearly 25 percent were only emergent readers, and 19 percent were still at pre- reading level.

Numeracy levels were worse. Nearly 64 percent of participants could only manage either emergent or pre-numeracy, even after six years at school. This is appalling.

Our own national assessments before Grade 12 are no better. The national Department of Education has published two evaluations of the education system, the first at Grade 3, and more recently at Grade 6. They make scary bed-time reading, especially if you live in the Eastern Cape, where 87 percent of Grade 6 learners don't achieve the National Curriculum Statement learning outcomes for mathematics, and 78 percent don't achieve the learning outcomes for the language in which they learn.

Most Eastern Cape children experience a profound barrier to learning - they are expected to learn in a foreign language. If you can't understand what goes on in the classroom, and you can hardly read, write or use numbers, your education is not worth the scrap of paper it is written on.

What can we do to improve things?

Although the factors associated with low educational achievement include poverty, ill health, joblessness, low parental education, lack of reading resources both at school and at home, lack of opportunity even for successful learners, and the ubiquitous ineptitude in the corridors of Bhisho, we can all do something about it.

We can demand that teachers teach our children adequately. We can demand that principals and governing bodies manage schools effectively. We can demand that our children learn in a language they understand. We can value education, because it's the only thing that can save us from continued poverty with all its associated ills.

We can all understand that a good quality education is everyone's right, and everyone's responsibility.

Barbara Valentine is a director at the Institute of Training and Education for Capacity Building. She writes in her personal capacity

Source: dispatch.co.za