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."This conclusion has the same shock value as the group's other finding that 29% of their Grade 4 sample children were "completely illiterate".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 the levels of energy and investment put into the final years of high school might be helpful to those who survived dropping out or being pushed out by systemic failure of the education pipeline, but it is far too late an intervention to deal with the more than 500000 children who never make it to Grade 12. The Stellenbosch group rightly demands concentrated efforts of policy and planning to redress reading disadvantage in the early years.I am not sure this is solely the schools' dilemma. In standard research on "opportunities to learn", researchers used to ask children a simple question - "how many books are there in your home?" Unsurprisingly, middle-class children had more books, even small libraries, in their homes which largely explained ability to read. A policy intervention should consider placing books in poor homes.Where I grew up, many young children learnt to read in church or mosque, sometimes by memorising chunks of scripture from the holy books. But you read, and there were all kinds of rewards for reading coverage from Genesis to Revelation; I normally dropped out somewhere between the "begats" of Leviticus but others persisted. Incentivising reading is something good schools do anyway, such as competitions among children for who read the largest number of books over the holidays.Children will read, but we have to make it worth their while and not assume reading is something the teacher does or instructs little ones to do. How many parents, for example, still read to children as they fall asleep at night?We did not have much in the home I grew up in, but the place was flooded with old copies of Reader's Digest; I read every issue voraciously. I am sure some of my friends will call for the decolonisation of Bessie Bunter books but wherever my nursing mother found them, I read and reread these precious story books. Here, then, is a challenge to every employer - how about giving every factory worker or secretary or municipal staff member a book for their children with every monthly salary cheque? In other words, contribute to building a reading culture in our communities that does not stop and start in schools.There is another reason not to place too much faith in schools as sources of inspired reading. How many teachers can actually read fluently and write competently in the language at the grade level in which they teach? We know the scary answer to that question in mathematics. But what about reading? Children's language competency depends so much on the reading and speaking capacity of the teachers, and not only the language teachers. A teacher who speaks fluently and correctly in a language, whether in science or social studies, models the spoken word for more than five hours a day every day. None of this is possible outside of a strong reading culture among professional teachers.Here's the rub. Until the basics of competent reading are established - the Stellenbosch group calls this "reading for meaning" - it is impossible to take children to the next level of reading at school and university. But I doubt very much that schools alone are the most important places in which such reading ability can be enhanced...