Mass failures in secondary education, necessary theoretical refinement in the education sector in Mozambique

Paulo Vilanculo"

The mass failures recorded in Mozambican secondary schools in the 2025 school year are not an isolated phenomenon, nor an unexpected pedagogical accident; rather, they constitute a social and pedagogical phenomenon that transcends immediate statistical interpretation, a visible expression of an educational system that has long been in tension between pedagogical truth, political imperatives, and administrative bureaucracy. Far from representing a temporary anomaly, these results reveal a structural crisis in the national education system, built over decades by massification policies unaccompanied by quality, politicized school management, and a devaluation of pedagogical rigor in Mozambique.This raises the fundamental question: what is the true meaning of education in Mozambique? Is it to form critical, competent, and socially responsible citizens, or merely to guarantee certificates that do not correspond to any real knowledge?

In Mozambique, mass failure did not emerge suddenly; it reflects the belated collapse of a model that preferred to conceal weaknesses instead of confronting them. These poor results did not originate in 2025. Historically, the Mozambican education system has never been distinguished by consistent and structural results. An anonymous teacher stated that "Mozambique has never had real positive results; whenever teachers produce genuine results, school principals alter them to politically legitimize their positions." This denunciation points to an institutional culture in which pedagogical truth is sacrificed in the name of convenient statistics and administrative stability, a paradoxical attitude. This reality was masked for years by administrative practices that confused educational policy with numerical engineering. As Balate, a public education specialist, emphasizes, "the poor results reflect the reality of education in Mozambique." For years, school results were artificially inflated, not by academic merit, but by hierarchical imposition.

The pressure on school administrations to "show results" has resulted in the manipulation of grading criteria, the dilution of evaluation criteria, and a pedagogical tolerance that confused inclusion with permissiveness. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron warn that educational systems can reproduce inequalities not only through access, but also through the illusion of success.

In the name of statistical inclusion, real learning was sacrificed. This scenario illustrates a phenomenon widely studied by Max Weber: the capture of institutions by interests of political domination. Émile Durkheim conceives of education as a central mechanism for socialization and moral reproduction of society. For John Dewey, education should prepare the individual for critical and competent participation in social life.

In her inauguration speech, the Minister of Education and Culture, Samaria dos Anjos Tovela, assured that she would create mechanisms for dialogue with the teaching profession in order to find solutions that could positively contribute to the teaching and learning process in the country. The minister believes that her background as a teacher could play a fundamental role in this dialogue: “…indeed, there is a group of the population that is marginalized, and these are our children, our young people. We have to call them and give them effective training,” she said. Paulo Freire categorically states that authentic education demands rigor, ethical commitment, and political responsibility. For Freire, facilitating is not liberating; it is often domesticating. The precariousness of teacher valuation constitutes one of the silent pillars of the degradation of the Mozambican education system. In addition to overloaded classes, scarcity of teaching materials, and administrative pressure for artificial results, many teachers face systematic delays in the payment of overtime and legally established incentives. The decline in education, in this sense, reveals a profound ethical failing on the part of the Ministry responsible.

In Mozambique, schools have ceased to be autonomous pedagogical spaces and have transformed into administrative apparatuses subordinated to the logic of legitimizing power, where academic results function as symbolic capital for maintaining positions and privileges. Teachers have been transformed into executors of administrative directives, often contradictory to the basic principles of pedagogy. When the State belatedly remunerates teachers for their additional effort, it implicitly communicates that education is a secondary and disposable service. Hannah Arendt warns that the devaluation of intellectual work compromises the very idea of ​​public responsibility; in the case of education, this translates into the erosion of pedagogical authority and the normalization of mediocrity. In this scenario, education ceases to be an engine of development and becomes a mirror of the crisis of the State itself. According to the sociology of teaching work literature, authors such as Tardif and Lessard demonstrate that the economic and symbolic devaluation of teachers weakens professional commitment and corrodes the ethics of pedagogical work.

Authors such as Fullan and Hargreaves argue that sustainable educational reforms require coherence between policy and teaching practice. The automatic promotion policy, implemented summarily by the Ministry of Education, produced precisely this effect: the appearance of academic progress without the corresponding acquisition of cultural and cognitive capital, where the student moves to the next grade but does not accumulate knowledge; obtains a certificate, but not competence. The policy and reliance on automatic promotion was not accompanied by serious investment in the continuous training of teachers, in the improvement of school infrastructure, nor in the reduction of student-teacher ratios; it operated at the level of the final result, ignoring the process. The system prioritizes administrative progression to the detriment of effective learning; education ceases to be a transformative right and becomes an empty ritual. When the system prioritizes administrative progression to the detriment of learning, the school becomes an empty certification ritual, incapable of fulfilling its emancipatory function, constituting a symptom of a system that has normalized mediocrity and has always penalized rigor.

In this instance, the education system abandons clear criteria for rigor and evaluative truth, compromising not only the teaching-learning process but also social cohesion itself. Transforming evaluation into an act devoid of epistemological criteria violates the "ethics of educational responsibility." Thus, the mass failures of 2025 should not be interpreted merely as a failure of students or teachers, but as a denunciation of a system that has strayed from its essential purpose. The social shock caused by the high number of failing students exposed an old wound in the progressively deteriorating public education system in Mozambique. Demanding results from teachers while maintaining precarious salaries and non-compliance with contractual overtime agreements reveals a structural contradiction that transfers to the teacher a failure that is, first and foremost, institutional. Without a serious break with the culture of manipulating results, without effective teacher appreciation, and without policies focused on real learning, as Giroux advocates, Mozambique will continue to produce certified generations, but incapable of responding to the scientific, economic, and social challenges of the country.

2025/12/3