By Barbie Sandler
Cape Town - One keeps reading about children in South Africa who cannot read or write for meaning.
The sad thing is that so many thousands of kids are malnourished, stunted in growth, and only if they are lucky do they get one meal a day at school.
I say lucky as we have seen the debacle in KwaZulu-Natal with school feeding. There is no doubt kids can’t learn if hungry or malnourished.
It is a recipe for disaster.
We also have the scenario that 62% of families have no father figure, so the poor mother or gogo is trying to keep hearth and home together and there is no time for doing homework or extra work with school-going kids.
We also have many households where kids are running the show.
These little kids can hardly be expected to do well at school when they are looking after siblings. Nothing will help until children are getting food in their stomachs (more than one meal a day), and help at home.
I wont even go into the dysfunctional schools where teachers don’t rock up to teach. I think our kids are on a hiding to nothing.
Cape Times
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