South Africa’s maths and science education has been ranked second last in the world, ahead of Yemen, according to a World Economic Forum report.
The quality of the country’s general education system ranked 140 out of 144 countries, while internet access in schools is ranked at 111 out of 143 countries, stated the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2013.
“Going up two positions, South Africa is in 70th place. Despite a sharp improvement in the development of its ICT infrastructure (59th) – notably in terms of international Internet bandwidth capacity (66th) – and a strong uptake by the business community (33rd), the ICT impacts (92nd), particularly the social ones (112th), remain limited.
“The perception of a lack of clear government vision (105th) to orchestrate and implement a holistic ICT strategy for the country, coupled with deficiencies in the educational system for some segments of the population (102nd), play negatively in this process and outweigh a rather positive political and regulatory framework for ICT development (21st) and pro-business environment (55th),” the report read.
It is the latest indictment on South Africa’s education system since the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literature Study (Pirls) which indicated that most South African grade five learners have not yet acquired basic literacy skills.
“Forty-three percent of South African grade five learners failed to reach the lowest international benchmark, in contrast to 5% of grade four learners internationally. This means that they have not yet mastered the basic reading skills required to access and retrieve information for reading comprehension purposes,” the Pirls report stated.
It further revealed that about 90% of the grade four learners tested attained the lowest international benchmark.
Learners tested in Sepedi and Tshivenda achieved the lowest results, according to the study. – M&G