The excitement around the results of last year’s matric exams has now died down. Indeed, the class of 2017 gave a very good account of themselves, with those who sat for the exams at private schools notching up a 98.76% pass rate and their public-school counterparts 75.1%. Hats off to them.

One of the things about the 2017 matric results that stand out for me is KwaZulu-Natal Education MEC Mthandeni Dlungwane lamenting the sizeable number of schools in the province that performed very badly, despite copious resources (read huge sums of money) being made available to them.

South Africa is well known for its massive expenditure on basic education of over R200-billion a year, or about 15% of the national Budget. According to the United Nations, this is proportionately higher than the basic education budgets of many developed countries, including the US, the UK and Germany.

But what do we have to show for this very generous funding of education? We may be producing pass rates of 70%-plus year in and year out, but the competence of our learners leaves much to be desired when they are compared with their counterparts from elsewhere in the world. In its 2016/17 Global Competitiveness Report, for example, the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked South Africa’s primary education system 126th out of 138 countries. The same report ranked the country’s higher education and training system 134th.

Another WEF report, released in 2016, ranked South Africa last in mathematics and science education – the third such ranking in a row. Less endowed countries like Nigeria, Mozambique and Malawi achieved much higher rankings in the same survey.

That poor African countries consistently outperform South Africa seems to suggest that Dlungwane may be misguided in emphasising monetary allocations when tackling our education system’s ills. If he was correct, schools in neighbouring Zimbabwe – which has a comparable history to South Africa’s – would not be the credible performers that they are. According to United Nations Children’s Fund statistics, an average of ten learners in Zimbabwean primary schools share a single textbook, yet they score higher than South African learners in both literacy and mathematics.

So, MEC Dlungwane, throwing more money at school underperformance will not make the problem vanish. A good starting point would be taking a leaf out of the books of those poor African countries that are doing better than us. If it means sending officials to countries like Malawi on a fact-finding mission, let it be. Of course, learning from Malawi would involve eating plenteous quantities of humble pie, in light of our President’s view of that country. Remember his remarks in 2013, when he was commenting on Gautengers’ resistance to e-tolling on the province’s urban freeways? He harangued them: “We can’t think like Africans in Africa, generally. We are in Johannesburg. This is Johannesburg. It’s not like some national road in Malawi.”

Professor Jonathan Jansen, one of South Africa’s finest educationists, argues that it is incumbent upon those in government – the likes of Dlungwane – to overhaul the culture of our schools and inspire and motivate teachers (oops – they are now called educators!) to perform their duties with passion and commitment. He also urges penalties for absenteeism, noting that, on average, five teachers are absent each day in many South African schools. And putting an end to trade union interference in educator appointments would also go a long way towards improving the quality of our school leavers, as would reducing class sizes. As Jansen puts it, 160 learners in a single class would burn out any saint.

I would add a dose of out-of-the-box thinking to the learned professor’s prescription. I am reminded of one African country that decided to expand access to basic education on attaining independence. But there were not enough schools. To get round this problem, the authorities introduced hot-sitting in some townships and other densely populated areas, whereby two classes would take turns to use one classroom – one from 07:00 to 12:30 and the other from 12:30 to 17:00. We need that kind of thinking here.