Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

School Is Not the Enemy. Poverty Is.

And poverty is lying to you every single day.

Let me start by agreeing with you.

The school system in South Africa is broken in ways that are real, documented, and often deliberately ignored by the people who designed it. Overcrowded classrooms. Teachers who are themselves products of the same underfunded system. A curriculum that teaches you the Periodic Table but not how to open a bank account. A language policy that measures your intelligence by your command of a colonial tongue while treating your mother tongue as an afterthought. You are not imagining it. You are not making excuses. The frustration is legitimate.

But here is the thing about legitimate frustration: it can still lead you to exactly the wrong decision.

“Your diagnosis of the problem is correct. Your prescription is killing you.”

Because what I am watching happen, across townships in Gauteng, in the Cape Flats, in the informal settlements of KwaZulu-Natal,  is a generation of boys who have correctly identified that the system is rigged, and then responded by removing themselves from the game entirely. As if the answer to a rigged game is to hand your opponents your chair.

That is not resistance. That is surrender with a confident face.

The Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Let us talk about the mathematics of dropping out, because nobody on that corner is going to give you these numbers.

37.6% – 65%  No Matric — unemployment rate. The highest of any group.

33.7%  Matric only — unemployment rate. A floor, not a ceiling.

~15–17%  TVET diploma / trade — unemployment. Cut the risk in half.

7–10%  University degree — unemployment. Nearly three times below the national average.

These are not motivational poster statistics. These are from Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey. The government you distrust. The data that even your enemies cannot argue with.

Now add this: for young men aged 15 to 24, the gap is even more savage. Without a Matric, youth unemployment hits 51.6%. With a university degree, it drops to 23.9%. That is a 28-percentage-point difference, the difference between occasionally eating and reliably eating.

“You are not competing against the guys on your street. You are competing against millions of other men who also dropped out — plus legal and illegal immigrants willing to work for half the price with no labour law protection.”

And because none of you have a piece of paper proving your skills, an employer can pay you whatever they want. Because the moment you complain, ten other men are waiting at the gate to take your place for less. That is not capitalism. That is the predictable outcome of a saturated, unqualified labour pool and you put yourself in it voluntarily.


Kill the Myth. Bury It.

You have been told the story. Bill Gates dropped out. Zuckerberg dropped out. Elon Musk built rockets without finishing his PhD. So why do you need school?

Here is what you were not told.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were enrolled at Harvard University when they left. Not Rustenburg High. Not a school with broken toilets and 45 kids per classroom. Harvard. They had already written software that was changing the world. They had institutional safety nets. Harvard granted them formal leaves of absence. They could have gone back.

Elon Musk? Two Bachelor of Science degrees,  Physics and Economics,  from the University of Pennsylvania. He dropped out of a PhD programme at Stanford after two days. After the undergraduate foundation was already complete.

These men did not reject education. They completed it, then leveraged it. The story you were sold is survivorship bias,  the psychological habit of remembering the three famous winners and forgetting the three million who tried the same shortcut and are now invisible.

On the African continent, the data is equally unambiguous.

Patrice Motsepe,  a Law degree from Wits. Aliko Dangote, a BSc in Business Administration from Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Koos Bekker, an MBA from Columbia Business School, the same institution Warren Buffett attended.

Even Richard Maponya, the Father of Black Retail, who built his empire under the boot of Apartheid, began with a formal teaching qualification and a Diploma in Draping and Tailoring. He did not wing it. He could not afford to.

“The people controlling the largest conglomerates on this continent are not accidental hustlers who skipped school. They are lawyers, economists, engineers, and corporate tacticians.“

The dropout billionaire is the statistical equivalent of winning the lottery. The global probability of dropping out of school and becoming a billionaire is approximately 0.005%. And in South Africa, that figure is even more brutal, because unlike Silicon Valley in 1994, we do not have the infrastructure of venture capital, the safety net of middle-class family money, or the geographic accident of being born near the right networks.


Why Poverty Is Lying to Your Brain
Here is the part I want you to sit with, because it is not about laziness and it is not about intelligence. Research from Harvard, Princeton, and the London School of Economics has documented what poverty actually does to the human brain.

When you are under sustained financial stress, when you do not know how the family is going to eat tomorrow, when there is a debt collector at the door, when your basic survival is genuinely uncertain, your brain does something measurable. It drops approximately 13 IQ points of functional capacity. Not because you are stupid. Because your cognitive bandwidth is full. The brain under that kind of pressure cannot think long-term. It is not wired to. It is wired to survive the next 24 hours.

Researchers call it tunneling. Like a person running out of air who can only think about the next breath, a person in poverty can only see the immediate crisis. School, which pays off in five years, cannot compete with R500 this Friday. Not because Friday does not matter. Because five years might as well be a different universe when you are not sure about tomorrow.

“Poverty is not a character flaw. It is a cognitive tax. And it is lying to you about your future.”

This is the poverty trap in its most precise form: the conditions of scarcity force decisions that guarantee more scarcity. And the most expensive decision it convinces you to make is to leave school — because school is slow, and pain is now.

I am not telling you that you are weak for feeling that pull. I am telling you that poverty is a sophisticated liar, and you need to know what you are dealing with before you let it rewrite your life.


What School Actually Gives You — Be Clear-Eyed About This
I am not going to lie to you the way the motivational posters do. School does not guarantee wealth. A Matric certificate will not put you in a mansion or give you a GTI. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

What education gives you is a floor. It means you do not fall into the absolute basement of the economy,  into the 60% unemployment cohort, into the informal labour market where you are replaceable by lunchtime, into the cycle where you work to eat today with nothing left over for tomorrow.

What it gives you, practically:

Basic literacy, digital literacy, and financial literacy, the three things that stop people from scamming you and stealing from you in business.

A passport. The Matric certificate is not the destination. It is the door. The day you decide you want to become an electrician, a plumber, a coder, or a civil engineer, that paper is the only thing that gets you through the entrance of the TVET college or the apprenticeship programme.

Legal standing. You cannot register a business to access government or corporate tenders without basic qualifications. You cannot apply for a formal business loan. Without paper, the hustle has a hard ceiling — and it is lower than you think.

And if traditional school feels designed for a person who is not you,  because honestly, it often was,  the answer is not to stop learning. The answer is to pivot. South Africa has an enormous shortage of practical, technical skills. Mechanics. Welding. Solar installation. Digital systems. Coding. These are not consolation prizes. They are recession-proof skills that will always attract cash, even when the formal economy is struggling. But to get into funded TVET programmes and apprenticeships, you still need to get through the baseline.

“Don’t stay in school because it’s a magical ticket to becoming a millionaire. Stay in school because it is the only shield you have against absolute destitution.“

A Personal Note, Before I End
I grew up in Gugulethu, Valhalla Park, Khayelitsha. I know what it looks like when the system feels it is  designed to crush you. I know what it feels like to be in a classroom where the textbooks are outdated, the 58:1 student-teacher ratio, the teacher is exhausted, and nobody seems to notice whether you are there or not.  The street calls to you, fueled by the desperate rhythm of the hustle. Meanwhile, uneducated politicians sit in power, sneering at excellence and branding the educated as “clever blacks.” They push a toxic lie: that books matter less than cash-filled Woolies black bags. Day after day, you are forced to witness the glamorous rise of scavengers, thieves, and inkabi,  spinning cold-blooded murder into quick fortunes.

And I also know what the data shows on the other side of those decisions, decades later. I have worked at Google, Canva, Nike, Vodacom. I have sat on boards. I have built companies. I did not do those things despite education. I did them because of it, not because school made me smart, but because it gave me the tools to learn, to compete, and to refuse to be replaceable.

You are not the problem. The system has real failures. But you are the only one who has to live with the consequences of your choices about that system. Poverty wants you to make the short-term decision. Your future self is asking you,  on behalf of the children you will one day raise, to make the long-term one.

“Your observation of the problem is right. Your solution, dropping out, is a mathematical trap.“

Finish the baseline. Get the paper. Use it as the foundation to build the life you actually want. Not the life poverty has scripted for you.

Poverty is your enemy. School is just the battlefield.
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— Dr. Mzamo Masito
Between Thoughts: Intellectual Musings
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..