School Dropouts and the Matric Mirage
South Africa loves a headline. A clean number. A “we did it” moment that fits into a sentence and survives a scroll. But education is not a headline. Education is a long walk, and the real story is always in who did not reach the end.
In this episode of the Checkpoint Podcast, Nkepile Mabuse and Dr Pali Lehohla return to a problem that stays stubbornly present: learners exiting the school system before matric. The conversation challenges a national habit. We talk loudly about pass rates, but quietly about dropouts. We celebrate the finish line, but we rarely count the people who were forced off the track.
One of the sharpest ideas in the episode is that school can become “optional” under pressure. Not optional in policy, but optional in practice. The pressures are layered. Work becomes available. Survival becomes urgent. The social environment
becomes louder than the classroom. And once that happens, schooling starts to feel like a choice made by families, when it is often a choice created by the system.
That is the first tension: we individualise a structural exit. We talk as if a learner simply decided to leave, when the deeper question is what made staying feel impossible, pointless, or humiliating.
A second tension is measurement. Dr Lehohla argues that if you want to understand education outcomes, you have to track progression properly. Not just the final result, but the pipeline. Who moved forward. Who repeated. Who left. And what incentives shape those patterns. When the system is judged primarily by the matric headline, it can begin to behave like a machine built for that headline. Anything that threatens it is treated as a problem to remove, rather than a life to support.
That leads into the episode’s most uncomfortable mirror: what happens to the learners who fall out. They can become invisible. They can become an embarrassment. They can be treated like “good riddance,” as if their absence improves the story the rest of the country wants to tell.
And underneath all of this is inequality, not as an abstract debate, but as the ground the education system stands on. The episode points to a country where outcomes remain deeply uneven, and where the distance between communities is not just economic, but educational. When inequality is entrenched, schooling does not function like a single national ladder. It functions like multiple ladders built at different heights, leaning against different walls, with different chances of reaching the top.
The episode does not pretend there is an easy fix. But it does insist on a clearer moral logic. Education is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism that makes opportunity real. It is the thing that turns money into a future rather than a statistic.
If the country wants to be honest about education, it has to stop treating dropouts as a side note. It has to measure them, name them, and build a system that refuses to flush people out for the sake of a cleaner number.