A frequent refrain is that education is a primary driver of the economy. More education gives you the credentials to get a better job and the extra knowledge makes people more productive. The combined effect is a boost to economic growth. At least that is what almost all commentators believe.
The truth however is that mere time at school and educational spending do not boost growth.
There is a large literature out there, by economists specialising in growth studies, confirming that. I confirmed it myself when I looked at the relationship between educational spending and long-term growth by country. I discovered there was none.
The thing that matters is what people actually know in terms of facts and techniques. These are qualities best measured by objective tests, usually standardised academic, work knowledge or other cognitive tests.
Standardised tests are all just samples of cognitive skills that are a good proxy for one’s total stock of them, particularly those needed to function and produce in the modern world. Again, there is a large formal literature confirming this.
I personally checked out the relationship between academic standardised test scores (from the World Bank data), national mean IQ scores (itself just another measure of current mental skills) and growth from 2000 to 2018.
South Africa’s problem is that differences in these skills make a large and robust difference to productivity, and by any measure SA is doing very badly. For example, someone in the UK with the same score as an average South African would be in the bottom 5-6%, and that is barely above their unemployment rate. More sobering is the fact that the average South African would be at the bottom 17% of much poorer Eswatini. In fact, our stock of cognitive skills is lower than that of all our neighbours (excepting Lesotho).
Moeletsi Mbeki agrees that skill shortages are the problem. He blames the degree of inequality in SA on an artificially created skills shortage – in other words, a failure to educate the people.
Formal education does not always result in the acquisition of this cognitive capital. Our education system is a sad example of that. We are failing our future hope, the youth of the country.
Cannot blame genetics
We cannot blame genetics because our population is substantially similar to our neighbours genetically. We should be able to achieve at least as much as they do, especially given that we have vastly more resources to throw at the problem and they themselves are not doing as well as they could.
If we were to achieve an average cognitive skill level on par with Eswatini (surely easily achievable) we would increase our annual economic growth rate by 1.62%, without any other change. Over one generation the cumulative effect would leave us 57% better off than we would be without the change.
Why do our students not gain the same knowledge as our poorer neighbours?
Several reasons. First our schools fall short of their teaching responsibilities and then attempt to cover it up. For example, in a research project on academic achievement among at-risk students in lower quintile schools, the competent students the schools had bragged about simply could not be verified.
Tests of those students who were at school showed their reading levels to be mostly at Grades 1 to 3. The students were in Grade 7 and claimed to be achieving level 6 and 7 for English higher grade. These were officially confirmed in a more recent revelation that Grade 4 students cannot read with comprehension. International standardised test scores (when SA still did them) back up the Grade 3-level finding. Schools avoid proper skill assessment, so the public is not aware of the service failure.
The second is we do not require students to do useful subjects like mathematics and science, or for them to attempt the higher-grade standards and achieve mastery. One study showed that objective assessment is virtually non-existent for black schools at all Grades below Grade 11, and although grades are therefore meaningless, almost all students progress up the Grade ladder anyway.
Useless guide
A few are capriciously held back even though they may be able. The metric “years of education completed” in SA is a useless guide to how much a person knows.
Grades 11 and 12 do have objective assessments but the standard a student must reach is ridiculously low. The pass mark for matric is an average of 35% for mostly undemanding subjects at less than higher grade.
If an exam is multiple choice a student could get 20% by answering randomly, which is 57% on the way to a pass purely by chance. Who thinks someone who barely squeaked through matric that way knows anything useful? Employers do not. They think most job seekers these days are unemployable for anything beyond menial labour.
The third is that many teachers, even many with “credentials”, are unqualified and explain things poorly to kids. Frequently they do not put in the effort of preparing lessons, marking or correcting homework, or even turning up to teach at all. Fraud happens outside the teaching profession too. Textbooks and equipment are not delivered, finances diverted, and ministers lie to Parliament. There is a discipline, ethics, management and union problem in the Department of Education.
Rather than fixing the Department of Education, government prefers trying a policy of forcing business to employ the unskilled under the assumption that the business environment will then develop the skills they failed to acquire at school.
Workplaces are even less suited than intensive formal education to teaching basic literacy, numeracy and innumerable other skills, including job-specific cognitive skills that depend on literacy and numeracy.
The policy will fail and leave businesses saddled with the unproductive. That in turn will make enterprises uncompetitive and less able to expand or employ more people. This will, in other words, intensify the negative effect of poor skills on growth.
Stressing the economy is not a sane alternative to fixing a failed government function. The failure of education itself must be tackled.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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