NO-ONE TO READ SA’s OPERATING MANUAL

The latest Pirls results offer a sobering assessment of South Africa’s basic education system — and of the country’s future leaders and prospects

Early in Jonny Steinberg’s recently published and highly acclaimed book, he writes about Mandela’s years as a young boy, and how he was educated.

“Nowhere does Nelson tell us of the first book he read. Nor do any of his biographers,” Steinberg writes. “It might well have been John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which had been translated into Xhosa decades earlier and was a staple on mission school syllabuses. What we do know is that during his final year at Healdtown [Methodist school] he read the first volume of Lord Macaulay’s History of England, for students were examined on it at the end of the year.”

When Mandela began his schooling in 1935 at the age of 16, Steinberg tells us, “black schooling in South Africa was in terrible repair”. Most of the schools were in Christian missions, and were largely unfunded by the government, and most of them could barely provide a “rudimentary education”.

In the Transkei, where the young Mandela lived,

“the situation was dire. In at least one large area, almost certainly reflecting the territory as a whole, one in seven children went to school. Among those who did, the vast majority attended institutions that went no further than standard 4 or 5, imparting to their students basic reading and writing in Xhosa and elementary arithmetic. The bulk of teachers were barely educated themselves.”

Last week, the department of basic education released the results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) for 2021. The study is an assessment of reading achievement, and it is conducted every five years by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

In 2021, Pirls was conducted in “nearly 60 countries” (I’m not sure why the IEA is imprecise about this number). The 2021 study revealed that 81% of grade 4 pupils were not able to read for meaning in any of South Africa’s 11 official languages. In 2016, that number stood at 78%, and in 2011 it was 82%.

In other words, 19% of grade 4 pupils could read for meaning in 2021. Put another way, it says that about four in five children need help to locate and retrieve explicitly stated information in simple and easy text.

According to news site Daily Maverick, South Africa exhibited the largest decline in reading outcomes of all countries with Pirls data in 2016 and 2021.

When Mandela read History of England, he was confronted with a text that had an overtly inscribed meaning.

Steinberg describes the event. “Here was a Thembu boy, his political consciousness barely formed, reading of an England superior in every conceivable way: it had built the fiercest navy and commanded the seas; it was home to the world’s first factories and produced most of the manufactured goods humanity consumed; it had developed the common law, the most civilised means devised, Macaulay averred, for regulating human affairs. Might Nelson have felt humbled and small? Probably. He was later to complain that the history syllabus at school was all about white people, Africans appearing as no more than ‘savages and thieves’. But reading is a complicated business, and a book can form a person in contradictory ways.”

Speaking of the old empire and reading for comprehension: in England, a 12-page reading test featuring “three substantial texts followed by 38 questions” that

was taken last week by 10- and 11-year-old primary school pupils was criticised by parents and teachers who complained it was too difficult.

The Guardian notes that the paper reduced some pupils to tears. “[It] included texts on a giant bat colony, which was adapted from a New York Times article, a camping trip featuring sheep rustlers and a boy on a remote Scottish island who hears a wolf.”

The newspaper quotes one of the head teachers as saying: “Most of my kids, English is not their first language, but they’re strong readers. They devour books, and yet this is how they will be judged.”

She went on to tell the newspaper that much of the content was totally unfamiliar to her pupils. Many couldn’t finish the test in the set time and some teachers were confounded too. One year 5 teacher, for example, said she “didn’t even know what a sheep rustler is”.

I included the example above in an attempt to give a bit of perspective.

Alas, so much for perspective: in 2021, England rose to fourth in the Pirls ranking for reading. South Africa, you will perhaps be unsurprised to note, is last on the table.

While second-language-speaking children in England are struggling to comprehend a New York Times article, in South Africa “about 60% of children have not learnt most of the letters of the alphabet by the end of grade 1”, a GroundUp article notes.

It adds: “By the end of grade 2, over 30% still don’t know all the letters of the alphabet.

“The report finds that these children are ‘perpetually behind’ and in ‘catch-up’ mode, though they never actually catch up.”

What a terrible thing to read: they never actually catch up.

Where are we going to get the Mandelas of the (very near) future when we need them, if we are a nation of illiterates?

So what are we doing about it? A recent Viewfinder piece (co-authored with GroundUp) reports that “last year, against a backdrop of spiralling youth unemployment, the department of higher education & training identified a lack of ‘reading comprehension’ as the

No 1 skill deficit in the country’s labour market”.

In President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2019 medium-term strategic framework, one of the government’s “fundamental goals” over the following 10 years was ensuring that “every 10-year-old will be able to read for meaning”.

When the ANC was re-elected later that year, he said: “If we are to ensure that within the next decade every 10-year-old will be able to read for meaning, we will need to mobilise the entire nation behind a massive reading campaign.”

There is a national reading plan that, ironically, is well-nigh unreadable, consisting as it does of rows on a spreadsheet.

Viewfinder reports that “the plan contains a wide range of proposed activities: from rolling out classroom libraries and improved teacher training, to encouraging food companies to follow the Chappies bubblegum example of incorporating reading materials into their packaging.

“There is no information about how these interventions are to be implemented, who would be accountable, and how these are to be funded.”

And, the article concludes, the “massive reading campaign” announced by Ramaphosa in 2019 “has never got off the ground, despite triumphant claims in parliament by the department of basic education. The department’s national reading plan ... is a seriously deficient document. Far from being a success, its supposed implementation is a collection of random, uncoordinated activities by provincial education departments with no proper monitoring.”

The cost to our economy is perhaps calculable, but the cost to our humanity is not. It’s an absolute tragedy that we aren’t teaching young South Africans to read. And this applies to all our official languages, not just perpetually colonising English.

In Winnie & Nelson, Steinberg writes that, “taking in The History of England now, one can only be struck by the power it must have exercised over a boy like Nelson”.

In the book, “for countless generations,

Macaulay writes, there was nothing about England that indicated greatness. Cut off from civilisation, it was a place of magic and darkness and superstition. And when the world did come, it was as conquerors, the Romans first, then the Saxons, then the Danes. And the last of these conquests was brutal.

“The subjugation of a nation by a nation has seldom, even in Asia, been more complete.”

Speaking of Macaulay’s description of a subsequent Norman invasion, Steinberg says that in this instance, “the English fought back with the cunning of a conquered people ... England’s greatness arises when conqueror and conquered make common cause ... Hence begins the history of the English nation.”

When Mandela read about the greatness of the English nation, of the might of its empire, that could have been the overwhelming, disempowering message he took away. But it’s not too fanciful to imagine that, in fact, he understood a deeper meaning one that perhaps helped set him on the path to liberation that he walked with others.

“It is extraordinary to contemplate how much of Nelson’s career is foretold in these pages,” writes Steinberg. “The revolutionary concealed among his people, the leader of the conquered building a new nation alongside his erstwhile oppressor. It is all there.” Where are we going to get the Mandelas of the

(very near) future when we need them, if we are a nation of illiterates? How will South Africans be inspired by Long Walk to Freedom if they can’t read for comprehension? And, even worse, how will we be able to fight the miasma of misinformation if we can’t understand how language manipulates, and is manipulated?