LITERACY IS BECOMING AN ENDANGERED HABIT

I WAS not particularly impressed by the fact that we celebrated World Literacy Day last week.

Well maybe “celebrated” is the wrong word. Literacy is not something our country’s leaders take very seriously.

A recent report stated that about 25% of Grade 4 pupils in the country were functionally illiterate. Yes, that’s right.

Unbelievably, a quarter of 10-yearolds in our schools cannot read after five years of schooling.

What have they been learning, for goodness sake? Toyi-toyi and advanced bribery techniques? Knitting?

Surely, if you can’t read you can’t study any other subjects properly. School books are full of printed words.

Maths, history, geography – they all come via printed words. If those words are just funny little meaningless squiggles on paper to you, you might as well tear them up and flush them down the toilet.

If your school is lucky enough to have flushing toilets, that is.

Our noble leaders swept into power 20 years ago on the promise they’d create a fair and equal society for us all. They have failed. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I suspect they’ve failed deliberately.

I think our population is even more divided than it was under the dreadful apartheid system.

Keep the people illiterate and they won’t be tempted to read newspapers that reveal the dirty secrets of our corrupt leaders.

For the children of the rich and politically connected we have schools with swimming pools, playing fields and state-of-the-art science laboratories and for the less fortunate we have schools that don’t even have running water or flushing toilets.

I have a teacher friend who works in several township areas where the “foundation phase” schools have no teaching materials at all.

Many of her friends collect old magazines for her to distribute to the

Grade R kids, so they have at least something to cut out and paste.

Some of us swipe advertising pamphlets from supermarkets for the township kids when we go shopping.

Fairness? Freedom? Equality? Hah! Happy World Literacy Day anyway, for those of us who can actually read this column.

If the ruling party get their way there will not be many of us around for long. Literacy is becoming an endangered habit.

Last Laugh

A student reported for an exam which required only “yes” or “no” answers. He sat down and started flipping a coin and entering his answers.

Heads for yes and tails for no. Then he repeated the whole process, occasionally muttering, “damn!”

The invigilator came over and asked what he was doing. “Just checking my answers,” he said.