The Big Read: Every year thousands of young children fall by the wayside. There are those four-in-10 who have failed matric; those 50-60% who never even made it to matric, dropping out on the way; and of course thousands of matriculants who will struggle to get employment.

Schooling cannot provide a certain route to dignity and success, despite hard work and a resilient determination by many of our young.

Education should point the way to a vision of a growing future, a vision of tolerance and citizenship, and provide the skills and commitment to tackle poverty and inequality. Instead, education fails the younger generation, condemning most to a life of marginalisation, exclusion and lack of hope. Instead of shooting for the stars, too many of our young people have to wander the streets. In a new democracy, it cannot be sustainable that this takes on a racial dimension.

While South Africa last year put a space satellite into the skies, its physics results in matric have declined. Can we keep the satellite in space or reap the benefits of the new knowledge about drought areas and human re-settlement?

Yet this is also a time of renewed vigour in education. Education Minister Angie Motshekga has usefully defined a plan of action centred around teachers, departmental delivery, and improved management. Media editorials have reflected the complexity of educational change while expressing the concern and anger of many citizens about the crisis state of schools.

As the Development Bank SA-co-ordinated Education Roadmap showed, there are three levels where education must be tackled. These are the in-class, the most important being teachers' capacities and confidence to teach. Then support to school is important, so that principals are able to manage. Departmental districts should provide the support (logistical, administrative and educational) to enable teachers to teach. The department's war on paperwork and form-filling is praiseworthy. Yet Mpumulanga's debacle and poor rural results show that something is wrong throughout the provinces.

Finally, the social level is crucial: First to address poverty effects from infrastructure to health and hunger. And second: how does everybody find a niche for involvement - business, NGOs, citizens, religious people - to take responsibility, to contribute and participate behind the framework set by a caring and effective government?

The longing for education and knowledge must express the nation's determination to secure the future for its children through working schools.

The minister's plans and words are good. Now they need to be translated into action. There is a need for social buy-in and a clear agreement around a programme of work and targets. Provinces, especially politicians and officials, need to be held to account.

Now the challenge for society is to rally round. Education change is enormously complex and must occur at all three levels of the toxic mix that holds back education. It needs the energies of all to be involved. The task is urgent, no one can afford to fold their arms and wait for government to act.

How do ordinary citizens put their shoulders to the wheel? Small things make a difference, from parents' involvement in their children's schools, employers and graduates ploughing back into disadvantaged schools, citizens volunteering their time, NGOs building partnerships with government, local governments building roads to schools, supporting sports fields and libraries as places for learners to study. Plans need to address the shortages of libraries, labs, staff rooms and other infrastructure in disadvantaged schools.

We need to become a learning nation, striving to be the best. South Africa needs the skills to ensure development, to imagine a future no one has lived and to find the means to plan and implement it. Systems need to be put into place that work and hold to account the officials and professionals in the front line. It is clear that the public has lost patience with the slow speed of teacher unions to take an active lead or responsibility.

Yet the trick is to avoid the blame game, acknowledge the real problems of thousands of teachers and their requirements of support, while setting down the minimum that is expected and the non-negotiables.

South Africans, all of us, need to move rapidly into solutions mode. We cannot keep failing our children, generation after generation. The eduction task is urgent with few immediate and short- term fixes.

A national discourse and agreement on priorities is also needed. This requires a huge change in mind set, a massive determination to make a difference, and a decision along with President Jacob Zuma, to make education "priority number one".

• Graeme Bloch is author of "The Toxic mix: What is wrong with SA's schools and how to fix it".