The reading crisis of SA children continues unabated with remote prospects of improvement. According to Nick Spaull, an education economist at Stellenbosch University and a member of the 2030 Reading Panel Secretariat, it will be the year 2098 when all school children in SA learn to read for meaning, on our current trajectory of improvement.
The panel aims to ensure that all grade 4 children in SA can read for meaning by 2030. Its report said schoolchildren have lost about 1.3 years of schooling since the pandemic started due to school closures and rotational timetables. According to researchers, these learning losses are equivalent to wiping out 6.5 years of learning progress.
The panel came about as a response to the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) which found that 78% of South African grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in all of the country’s official languages they were tested in.
The panel has recommended that a universal standard assessment of reading be implemented at primary school level. Furthermore, there needs to be a costed and budgeted plan to fix the reading crisis.
There also needs to be a standard minimum set of reading resources to all foundation phase (FP) classrooms. Lastly, a universal audit of pre-service teacher education programmes was recommended.
The report noted that to improve current outcomes, the education system needed a complete overhaul.
“Nothing short of a sustained countrywide overhaul of the education system would be likely to yield this result. It would require a complete restructuring of the way that teachers are being re-oriented towards reading in the early years,” the report said.
It gives cold comfort that the future generation will not have a healthy relationship with books which would hamper any development prospects for the country. As reading is the foundation for learning, these pupils’ chances of learning are slim and their future prospects less promising. Reading is necessary across the curriculum.
This reading crisis is clear evidence of the ANC government’s failure to improve education since assuming power in 1994. That we have this crisis is an indictment on the lack of foresight through not paying close attention to the foundations of education. Instead, what we have witnessed over the years has been an unhealthy preoccupation with the exit phase through the matric results.
Contributing to the crisis has been a failure to recognise that teaching reading is a speciality and to give priority to this through human and financial resources.
Teaching reading entails proficiency in the different methods and approaches. These include the skills approach, the general approach and the SQ3R which is an acronym for survey, question, read, recite and review.
A competent reading teacher can ensure a firm foundation for pupils to strengthen their prospects of success in later years. Moreover, pupils themselves should be encouraged and stimulated to read from an early age. The emphasis should be on the fact that it can never be too early to start.
Reading should not only be for passing tests and examinations, but for life. The ultimate end should be that children read for pleasure. It should be impressed upon them that reading is fun with the implication that those who do not read miss out on the fun.
As reading opens many doors, pupils should be alerted to the fact that doors of opportunity would be closed to them if they do not read.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and the penalty for not reading will be minds that are weak with diminished abilities to reason. Communication skills are central to human interaction and can be enhanced through reading.
The benefits of reading are manifold and can be a determining factor between success and failure.
To read is to discover new things and defeat ignorance. Thinking skills are also improved and this has the added benefit of sharpening problem-solving skills.
This would ensure that today’s readers become tomorrow’s leaders, to paraphrase Margaret Fuller. Ensuring that SA becomes a reading nation should be a national preoccupation that keeps our rulers awake at night. Success in this regard will help turn around the current crisis. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate.
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