By CELIA W. DUGGER


KHAYELITSHA, South Africa - Seniors here at Kwamfundo high school protested outside the staff room last year because their accounting teacher chronically failed to show up for class. With looming national examinations that would determine whether they were bound for a university or joblessness, they demanded a replacement.

“We kept waiting, and there was no action,” said Masixole Mabetshe, who failed the exams and is now out of work.

The principal of the school, Mongezeleli Bonani, said in an interview that there was little he could do but give the teacher a warning. Finally the students’ frustration turned riotous. They threw bricks, punched two teachers and stabbed one in the head with scissors, witnesses said.

The traumatized school’s passing rate on the national exams known as the matric tumbled to just 44 percent.

Thousands of schools across South Africa are bursting with students who dream of being the accountants, engineers and doctors this country desperately needs, but the education system is often failing the very children depending on it most to escape poverty.

Post-apartheid South Africa is at grave risk of producing what one commentator calls another lost generation, entrenching the racial and class divide rather than bridging it. Half the students never make it to 12th grade.

“If you are in a township school, you don’t have much chance,” said Graeme Bloch, an education researcher at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. “That’s the hidden curriculum - that inequality continues, that white kids do reasonably and black kids don’t really stand a chance unless they can get into a formerly white school or the small number of black schools that work.”

A youth movement seeking equality in education is gaining energy. In Cape Town recently, thousands of students from township schools marched to City Hall in their school uniforms, asking for libraries.

# Scoring at Bottom

Despite increases in education spending since apartheid ended, South African children consistently score at or near bottom on international achievement tests.

And the wrenching achievement gap between black and white students persists. Here in the Western Cape, only 2 out of 1,000 sixth graders in predominantly black schools passed a mathematics test at grade level in 2005, compared with almost 2 out of 3 children in schools once reserved for whites that are now integrated, but generally in more affluent neighborhoods.

South Africa’s schools are still struggling with the legacy of the apartheid era, when the government established a “Bantu” education system that sought to make blacks subservient laborers. Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister who was the architect of apartheid, said Bantu must not be subjected to an education that shows him “the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze.”

# Discipline for Teachers

Most teachers in South Africa’s schools today got inferior educations under the Bantu system, and this has seriously impaired their ability to teach the next generation, analysts say. But South Africa’s schools also have problems for which history cannot be blamed, including teacher absenteeism, researchers say.

As South Africa has invested heavily in making the system fairer, the governing party made some serious mistakes, experts say. Teacher colleges were closed down, without adequate alternatives. The teachers’ union too often protected its members at the expense of pupils, critics say.

Teacher vacancies commonly go unfilled for months, said Angie Motshekga, South Africa’s new education minister. Principals cannot select the teachers in their schools or discipline them for absenteeism.

Ms. Motshekga said she had the strong backing of South Africa’s new president, Jacob Zuma, to give principals greater authority, and would also seek to change the law so the education department could pick principals directly and hold them accountable.

# Hungry for Knowledge

Despite last year’s violent episode, students at Kwamfundo Secondary School seem to feel genuine affection for their school and speak of their hunger for knowledge.

Even when they realized the science teacher was absent one recent first period, the student body president and his sidekick, a radiantly optimistic AIDS orphan, rose to lead a review session on evolution.

Later that day, Arthur Mgqweto, a math teacher, strode into the classroom. He teaches more than 200 students each day for a salary of $15,000 a year.

Mr. Mgqweto grew up in the countryside during the apartheid years, ashamed to go to school because he had no shoes. He finished high school in his 30s. His only son was stabbed to death at age 21 in a nearby township.

“I always explain to them, life is very hard,” he said. “They must get educated so they can take care of their families when they grow old.”




South Africa’s rural and township schools are racked with problems like teacher absenteeism. When a teacher does not show up for class, students in Khayelitsha step up to lead the lessons.