WHEN a child is unable to read, there are several correctable causes unless it is a medical problem.
Most children, unless brain impaired, learn to read easily.
Therefore, when they seemingly are unable to read, there are problems outside themselves which are correctable which we should be aware of so we can address them.
Today I am looking at problems which arise from the socio-cultural axis of the reading material.
When children are not at peace within themselves, they do not ensconce.
There is a series of primary school readers, Sunrise Readers, which are popular, but not exclusive to former white schools.
These are a cause for concern.
The socio-cultural axis of these readers is strange to most African children because the African is presented as an inferior species to whites.
Affluence is also assumed to be exclusive to whites.
At the weekend (February 12-13), I was reminded of this racist, classist socio-cultural axis of the Sunrise Readers.
It was Book 9, about Jenny (white) and Chipo (African).
Chipo was a guest at Jenny’s home.
At bath time, Jenny’s mother invited the two girls to take a bath.
The girls were to have a bubble bath.
Jenny’s mother gave them a bubble bath, which liquid they poured into the bath tub before they took their bath.
I was helping this Grade Four child to read Book 9 and something totally surprised me.
His reading was not phonetic.
Where it said let, he would say s/c.
In shock I asked him where the ‘s’ or ‘c’ is.
He was at a loss.
When I asked him to identify the first letter of the word, he did not say ‘L’.
My puzzlement changed to confusion.
Surely he must know the alphabet, so how come he could not identify the letter ‘L’.
I refused to believe that a Grade Four child could fail to identify any letter of the alphabet.
Strange isn’t it?
We struggled on with the reading.
We came to the word liquid (the bubble bath).
He still could not pronounce the word.
He did not even identify the letter ‘L’, instead he said soap.
Because the girls were having a bath, he guessed soap was a possibility.
Then something became very clear in my mind.
He was not reading as in deciphering the letters of the alphabet as they are configured to form particular words.
He was guessing.
I knew then he had been taught reading the ‘look and say’ method using the so-called word recognition.
In this method, words are repeated to the child as they are shown to him/her and sometimes this is accompanied by pictures.
Children are not taught to understand the construction of words as groups of letters.
He had not been taught the phonetic method which is based on the alphabet, relating the sounds of the words to the letters of the alphabet which make up the words. This is the way people should be taught to read instead of being made to memorise words and go through text guided by the familiarity of words you have seen or heard repeatedly.
When I realised this, my heart sank.
The child had been stitching, reading through a combination of guesswork, studying the pictures, remembering words which had become familiar through repetition.
He was not reading at all.
While I was discussing this with the mother, something nagged me and I stopped dead.
What is it that the child was reading anyway?
Why should the child even ensconce?
What was he reading about bubble baths?
He does not even have a bath tub at home, let alone a bubble bath.
What does a bubble bath mean to a child who has never had one?
In this book, the child was reading about bubble baths at Jenny’s and chasing roadrunners at Chipo’s place.
What does an African child feel like when he reads about bubble baths as exclusive to whites, and the lot of the Africans being confined to chasing roadrunners?
What percentage of African children who read these books have bubble baths or have bathrooms fitted with bath tubs?
And why should having a bath in a tub be confined to the white race?
This is Rhodesia still at war with the African child; at war with his/her psyche; at war with his/her self-conception, insisting there are barriers, with the African belonging across the divide, denied of amenities that make life easier and pleasanter.
The African child is being told: ‘This is not your world, ndeyana Jenny’, ‘Go home and chase roadrunners’. Why should the African not have bath tubs, bubble baths as well as roadrunners at home?
Why does race have to be part of this?
This child I was assisting claimed to have finished Book 9 (about Jenny and Chipo), had he even read it?
I don’t think so.
What should motivate this child to read a book which contrasts him throughout as the disadvantaged African with the white who has everything?
It does not make him feel good as an African.
This is the same child who, some months back, asked me: “Mune kumusha here kune mombe nemakwayi, nembudzi nemunda?”
I said yes, and he asked me again: “Can you take me to your home so that I can see cattle, goats, sheep, fields, neimba?”
I promised I would.
He was overjoyed.
He complained that whenever they go for holidays to his grandmother’s, it’s nice, but ‘hakuzi kumusha, hakuna mombe, hwai nembudzi; hakuna dzimba and he could not be at peace.
So this is a child who knows who he is; an African with no apologies for who he is.
This child would not be comfortable being told whites are a better race so they are entitled to the best while blacks are confined to the dunghill.
He knows what he is worth, and can never accept to be a second-class citizen and, therefore ,there was no reason to ensconce with such a reader.
His apparent reading incompetence arises from two reasons.
First, the series is socio-culturally insulting to the African and second, he was not taught to read phonetically, which would still have been an uphill task because the readers (books) are irrelevant and demeaning to him as an African.
It is still the socio-cultural axis of Rhodesia which were inimical to Africans — African children would naturally be disturbed by such.
The task at hand is to find readers (books) that are socio-culturally relevant to the children and then teach them to read phonetically utilising content that is not so alien to them.