Next time you visit a school, take a Grade 3 or 4 reading book and ask a child in any class to read you a passage from that book.Prepare to be shocked. Reports that South African children cannot read, write and calculate at the grade level required are no longer news. But every now and again a solid piece of research points to the consequences of these frightening levels of disadvantage, such as in this quotation from a new study by a Stellenbosch group called Research on Socio-Economic Policy: "At the moment in SA, about 60% of children cannot read at even a basic level at the end of Grade4. These children will never fully engage with the curriculum and will fall further and further behind even as they are promoted to higher grades."Put bluntly, once this kind of gap in literacy (and numeracy) levels opens up in the foundation years, it remains not only with individual children but with whole cohorts of pupils through the high school years and into the university years. That is why...
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