We condone an education system that guarantees future inequality

The gravest injustice in South Africa today is not the ubiquitous crime that terrorises citizens every day, nor is it the rampant corruption and incompetence that rob our communities of the resources to live decent lives. It is the systematic denial of human capability development by denying adequate schooling to the majority of South African children.

The capability deprivation experienced by today’s adults results from past injustices and undoubtedly requires rectification, but that we operate an education system that promises large groups of today’s children that they will grow into future adults with capability deprivations constitutes an injustice beyond measure.

This fact severely undermines the moral standing of our society and by this measure, along with many others, South Africa is a grossly unjust society.

I consider a just society to be one in which there is fair and equal access to opportunities for citizens to develop their human capabilities and to access economic opportunities. That is, everyone has fair equality of opportunity to gain access to high-paying jobs (if it is employment they seek) or high-value supplier contracts (if they run businesses).

A society where such access to opportunities is denied to a group of people by the institutional arrangements in society is not just.

The reality is that human capabilities required for this fair equality of competing for opportunities are developed primarily at school.

To be sure, not all capabilities are developed at school — home life plays a big role, as can extramural activities; similarly we know that preschool, too, has a substantial influence.

However, it remains the case that the bulk of a person’s capability development happens during the 12 years of primary and high school.

A just society in which every citizen enjoys fair equality of opportunity to engage in economic activity would be one that affords every citizen fair equality of opportunity to develop their capabilities and thus one that offers every citizen access to equal educational opportunities.

This is certainly not the case in South Africa, where 78% of Grade 4s, the vast majority of whom are black, are functionally illiterate.

By our schooling system we have structured our society to deliver inequality into the future, and, based on this structure, we can pick out today who the winners and losers are going to be.

This constitutes a deeply unjust situation, one that commits gross violations of human rights against the children of our nation by denying them the opportunity not only to develop their full human capabilities but to compete fairly in a competitive marketplace, thus permanently relegating them to poverty, or to low-income lives at best.

Equal opportunity does not mean that everyone has equal wealth. There are limited numbers of high-paying jobs — not everyone who sets out to be an engineer or actuary or CEO becomes one.

In a just society, as conceived here, inequality will still exist, and some will still be disadvantaged, but this disadvantage will not be due to the mere fact of where the person is born or their race or gender. Rather this will be the result of their talents, efforts and decisions.

In a just society, equal talent and equal effort are equally rewarded when the market can absorb them.

In the South Africa that we are currently upholding, this is not the case — equal talent and equal effort do not bring equal reward.

Rather, reward arises by excluding some from opportunity and offering others privileged and exclusive access, first to quality schooling and then to tertiary education and economic opportunities.

Every year when school results are released there is an outcry about the shocking state of our school system, but this outcry quickly fades, leaving our children to suffer in silence as we strip them of their opportunity to develop their capabilities.

This is shameful.

By our silence we are all complicit in this injustice.

There is no greater urgency in our country than to take seriously the need to dramatically restructure our schooling paradigm.

Many experts have outlined what our schooling system requires — we know what needs to be done.

My aim here has been to point out the urgent moral case for action and to spur us all on to step out of our silence and hopefully encourage our government officials to have greater vision and step out of their complacency.

Williams is chairman of Read to Rise, a youth literacy nonprofit organisation