That 36% hit me hard. Scoring 19 out of 50 to fail my first maths test in the opening weeks of my time at the University of Cape Town affected everything. It tarnished the stellar scores I was getting in all other courses and demanded a rerouting of my energies. And until I got things back on track, it made life a lot less enjoyable.
You’ve also just experienced the effect of maths not adding up. “This nitwit thinks 19 out of 50 is 36%,” your inner monologue may have shouted. When the maths isn’t mathing, everything suffers. Economic prosperity is no different.
Cementing our failure
Prosperity is built on the dynamic connections among myriad ingredients. We all have our favourites — entrepreneurship, policy, trust and so on — but it is the amalgamation that counts. Still, some elements drag down the sum of the parts. Like faulty cement, they weaken the other parts and the whole. Mathematics education is one.
That math matters to growth is among the more settled findings in economics. When economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann tested what actually drives long-run growth, swapping years of schooling for measured cognitive skill lifted the share of cross-country growth differences their model could explain from roughly a quarter or a third to nearly three-quarters. Skills, not certificates, build economies.
The price of neglecting them is concrete. The same authors, working for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD), say a middle-income country that equipped every child with basic skills would reap gains averaging more than eight times its current GDP over today’s pupils’ lifetimes. Neglect it, and an economy pays a standing tax in output forgone.
At the bottom of the class
By that measure South Africa is paying nearly the maximum. In the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics & Science Study (TIMSS) assessment, its grade 5 pupils came stone last of the countries with reportable results, on 362 points, below second-from-last Kuwait and far beneath the 500-point centre of the scale. Grade 9s did better, but still ranked fifth from bottom. In short, South Africa sits at the floor of almost every maths assessment it enters.
Why this should worry a finance minister, not only an education one, is set out in “The Cost of Not Counting”, a recent paper by RMB chief economist and head of research Isaah Mhlanga, who is also a member of the presidential economic advisory council; Sizwe Nxasana, founder and CEO of Future Nation Schools and the Sifiso Learning Group; and Adrian Saville, my colleague at the Gibs Centre for African Management & Markets (CAMM).
Maths scores, they argue, sit at the head of a chain: they track competitiveness, competitiveness drives income per head, and income decides how many workers an economy can absorb. Break the first link, and the rest does not follow. South Africa’s ranking, they insist, “is not a coincidence. It is a consequence.”
By design
Some of the damage is by design. “The Cost of Not Counting” points to a 2006 decision to offer mathematical literacy as a parallel subject, which has become a one-way valve: many matric pupils are now steered into it, not for want of aptitude but because the system defaults them there.
As the authors put it, “aptitude was never the constraint. The system was.” They fault teacher preparation too: too few trainees leave university able to make the subject intelligible, and assessment rewards memorised procedure over reasoning. Money also isn’t the key. South Africa already spends disproportionally on education.
If the design is part of the problem, it is also part of the solution. Poland is the textbook case: in the early 2000s it scrapped the early streaming of pupils into vocational tracks and kept them in a common academic curriculum. Its weakest or would-be vocational pupils improved by more than a standard deviation.
Portugal managed a similar feat by fixing on results, not inputs: in 2011 it brought in the Portuguese Mathematical Society to write tougher standards, and within a few years its primary pupils outscored Finland’s on TIMSS. Neither bought its way up the tables. Both bolstered the quality of what pupils could actually do and how they are assessed.
Readers will be relieved to learn that I re-strategised and passed the MAM102 course with a solid upper second. South Africa’s mathematical misery will be harder to repair. But the diagnosis is clear, and solutions abound. We can keep adding ingredients — money, tests, teachers — but the broken design must be unbroken to fix the whole.
Macleod is a founding member of CAMM, which conducts academic and practitioner research and provides strategic insight on African markets
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