Philosophy with children as part of the solution to the early literacy education crisis in South Africa

Abstract

In this article I argue that insufficient attention is paid to the explicit teaching of comprehension in South African literacy policies and practices. Like elsewhere, governments reinforce the existing curriculum gap by trying to solve the achievement gap in early literacy. I substantiate my claim through a critical analysis of a report commissioned by the South African government and written by the National Education and Evaluation Unit (NEEDU). At an analytical level there is a logical problem with NEEDU's recommendations about early literacy – there is a mismatch between the solutions and the problems it tries to solve. Unlike government responses to South Africa's very poor results in national and international literacy tests, I claim that the findings of these tests point to the urgent need to teach higher-order questioning skills to teachers explicitly from preschool onwards. By referencing national and international research evidence of an approach to teaching and learning called Philosophy with Children (P4C), I argue that the inclusion of philosophical thinking in early childhood literacy education could help teach the ‘full literacy’ as recommended by the NEEDU report.