By Dumisani Tshabalala
Recently, to mark International Literacy Day 2025 under the theme: Promoting Literacy in the Digital Era, Buti Manamela, South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education and Training, said, “In an age of endless information, literacy is no longer about accessing words, but about mastering the world.”
Reflecting on his address, I was struck by how his words echo a deep anxiety I see every day in my work as an educator. We are facing a profound disconnect between what we say literacy is and what our children, and our democracy, actually need it to be.
For as long as I can remember, the literacy debate in South Africa has been stuck in familiar ruts: phonics versus whole language, tablets versus textbooks, English versus mother tongue. But I think this noise distracts us from a more dangerous problem. We have become obsessed with the performance of reading, often mistaking the sound of fluency for the substance of understanding.
I’ve seen it countless times. We rightly praise the Grade 4 learner who reads a passage aloud with perfect diction and pace. It’s a beautiful performance. But what happens when we ask her to analyse the author’s argument, question the evidence, or even just explain the text’s significance in her own words?
Too often, there’s a hesitant silence. We then have the other learner, the one who stumbles over syllables and reads haltingly, yet in a class discussion, they can brilliantly trace cause and effect or poke holes in a weak claim.
When we prioritise speed over substance, we celebrate the performance, not the comprehension. This isn’t just an academic concern; I believe it’s a matter of civic survival in our information-saturated world. Literacy today is about the ability to resist manipulation. Can a young person spot the bias in a news report, untangle the distortion in a cropped graph, or see through a misleading statistic? In an era of viral memes and deepfakes, this is no longer a niche skill. It’s fundamental.
When the 2021 PIRLS study revealed that 81 percent of our Grade 4 learners could not read for comprehension in any language, it sent a shockwave through the country. But, if we’re being honest with ourselves, was it truly a surprise? For too long, we’ve operated under the flawed assumption that if you teach a child to decode words, comprehension will magically follow. We rush through content, rarely pausing to model the essential work of sense-making: asking who wrote this and why? How do we know this is true? Who is left out of this narrative? We often separate reading from thinking as if they were two different tasks.
So, what would it mean to truly embrace the Minister’s call to master the world, not just the words?
It starts by weaving critical thinking into the very fabric of learning. It’s not enough to have a once-a-year lesson on media literacy. We need to arm our children with a set of relentless questions to ask of everything they consume: Who created this? What is their claim? What is the evidence? And, perhaps most importantly, what is being omitted? Asked daily, these questions turn mindless scrolling into active scholarship.
This work also requires us to use all our languages as levers for understanding. A child who can reason powerfully in isiZulu is not deficient; they are bilingual in thought. Brainstorming in home languages and drafting in English isn’t an indulgence; it’s just good pedagogy, rooting new, complex ideas in the familiar soil of a child’s mind.
And we must make writing a daily, purposeful habit, not just the occasional formal essay, but quick reflections, summaries, and arguments. Writing, after all, is just thought made visible. If we want our children to think more clearly, we must demand they write more often.
At the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, we try to embody this vision. Our teachers weave concepts across subjects, so a debate in Life Sciences reappears in a Geography lesson and becomes a comparative editorial in English. Our students learn to ask, with a polite but fierce curiosity, “Where did this claim come from?” Visitors to our school don’t just hear fluent reading; they hear fluent questioning.
This work isn’t glamorous. It’s the slow, cumulative effort of weekly book clubs, of teachers sharing articles in the staffroom, of principals who fiercely guard time for deep, unhurried reading against a packed curriculum.
The ultimate goal here isn’t just better test scores, though those will certainly come. The real goal is active, engaged citizenship. A truly literate nation isn’t one where everyone can read a paragraph aloud flawlessly. It’s a place where a teenager can analyse a loan agreement before signing it, where a voter can see beyond the slogans in a manifesto, and where a community can interpret its own data to demand a better future.
We are at a crossroads. We can continue to chase the illusion of fluency, or we can choose to cultivate a generation that doesn’t just read the world but has the tools, the confidence, and the critical consciousness to reshape it. That is the literacy our children, and our democracy, deserve.
Dumisani Tshabalala is Head of Academics at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (OWLAG)
