Bars to reading culture include low quality of training

When the seminal book I Write What I Like by the late Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko was published in 1978, it wasn’t about individual self-expression or self-indulgence. It was a political statement with its origins in the work of Brazilian adult literacy activist Paulo Freire.

Freire identified the profound connection between reading, understanding the world and so being able to change it. Half a century after Biko was murdered by the apartheid state, his country is no nearer being able to do this.

Instead, many of SA’s children are struggling to read. This was revealed in the results of the international Pirls 2016 literacy tests on nearly 13,000 South African schoolchildren.

The study showed that 78% of grade 4 children cannot read for meaning in any language. SA scored last of the 50 countries tested. Also worrying was that there were no signs of improvement over the past five years. For boys the situation may have worsened.

A few weeks before these results were released, another study had found that 27% of children under five in SA suffer from stunting and that their brains are not developing as they should. Damage like this is largely irreversible. It leads to low school achievement and work productivity — and so to ongoing poverty.

These truly disadvantaged children are those of the poor; the 25% of SA’s population who live in extreme poverty. Given their dreadful circumstances, it might be understandable that 25% of children might not succeed in learning to read. But 78%? There has to be another explanation for that.

The reasons range from the absence of a reading culture among adults to the dearth of school libraries allied to the high cost of books and to the low quality of training for teachers of reading.

Part of SA’s reading catastrophe is cultural. Most parents don’t read to their children because they are not literate and because there are very few cheap children’s books in African languages — English is a minority home language in SA. But reading at home also doesn’t take place at the highest levels of middle-class society and the new elite. It’s treated as a lower-order activity that’s uncool, nerdy and unpopular. South Africans spend twice as much on chocolate each year than they do on books.

The situation doesn’t improve at school. Until provincial education departments ensure that every school has a basic library and that children have access to cheap suitable books in their own mother tongues, SA cannot be seen as serious about the teaching of reading.

Reading is taught badly, too. SA closed down its teacher training colleges from 1994 to 2000, ostensibly to improve the quality of teacher education by making it the sole responsibility of universities. This backfired.

Previously, universities used to teach mainly high school teachers. Now they are expected to train foundation-level teachers of the first three school grades. This was an area university’s education departments knew little about. They also inevitably incorporated only training college educators who had postgraduate degrees. Sadly, these people generally had no great interest in the grunt work of teaching little children to read. So foundation-level teacher training at universities is often a disaster.

There has been some attempt to tackle this bungle. The latest is the Department of Higher Education and Training’s primary teacher education project.

The teacher training curriculum is also problematic. Most teaching about reading instruction in SA’s universities is outdated. Faculties of education appear to have largely ignored modern scientific advances in understanding how reading takes place.

Over the past three decades cognitive neuroscience has clarified and resolved a number of debates about reading. It has been proven beyond doubt that reading, becoming literate, alters the brain.

Learning the visual representation of language and the rules for matching sounds and letters develops new language processing possibilities. It reinforces and modifies certain fundamental abilities, such as verbal and visual memory and other crucial skills. It influences the pathways used by the brain for problem-solving.

Failing to learn to read is bad for the cognition necessary to function effectively in a modern society. The inability of SA to teach children to read leads to another type of stunting: one that is as drastic as its physical counterpart.

The country now has generations who have been cognitively stunted because of a large failure in its culture and educational provision. All South Africans are implicated if they don’t do their utmost to help people learn to read.

• Aitchison is professor emeritus of adult education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This article first appeared on The Conversation.