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South Africa’s education system in crisis, needs reform: CDE

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The Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) called for the dismissal of Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga to get the country out of the crisis that the education system is facing.

The CDE recently released several reports, outlining the state of education, with findings revealing that South Africa is the single biggest learning under-performer relative to GDP per capita among low and middle-income countries.

It was also found that South Africa’s education system is worse than those of Kenya and Tanzania, which have a GDP per capita of less than one-fifth of South Africa.

The Executive Director at the CDE Anne Bernstein says, “We’ve written five reports, pooling together what South African best academics and international experience have shown us about the South African basic education system…”

“The truth is, the Minister talks of a system on the rise, the President tells us about the silent revolution – the facts are, a system that is failing to teach the majority of young pupils to read, write, or add,” says Bernstein.

South Africa’s education crisis and reconstruction:

Recalling devastating statistics the CDE cites 2016, 2019 and 2021 stats that show that respectively the majority of Grade fours could not read for meaning in any language. Little over a third of Grade fives had some basic maths knowledge and more than half of Grade ones did not know the letters of the alphabet after a year at school, prompting the question, what do they do at school?

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