The Big Read: The power of reading

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 Polic...