“Because sometimes the biggest obstacle to change is the story we keep telling ourselves.”

📍Context: The Now and the Not-Yet

We find ourselves in a moment of layered time:

  • A new millennium already a quarter century old

  • A 21st century in its early adolescence

  • A new decade just finding its rhythm

  • A world shaped by 4IR, and already whispering about the 5th

  • And a generation growing up with more screen time than story time

Learners born into this time are not the same species of reader or citizen as before. They are children of the global village — connected, curious, sometimes overwhelmed — and they need guidance not just to survive, but to thrive, adapt, and transform.

But something is wrong.

📉 The Crisis Beneath Our Feet

South Africa’s reading scores in the 2023 PIRLS revealed what many suspected: we are in an enormous literacy crisis. But it’s not only us. Across the world, reading for meaning, joy, and understanding is declining. In many places, especially underprivileged communities, the reading muscle has atrophied, and stories are fading into background noise.

And yet — the invisible mycelium network of literacy still exists beneath us. The roots are there: books, language, mother tongues, oral stories, digital tools, committed teachers, determined parents, generous partners.

So why are we still struggling?

🧠 The Immunity to Change

The answer may lie in what Robert Kegan called “Immunity to Change” — a deep, invisible resistance to the very shifts that could help us grow. It’s like having the medicine, but refusing to take it because we fear the side effects more than the illness.

🧩 Example:
A school wants to improve reading, so it sets aside 30 minutes a day for it. But some educators resist, worrying it will “take away from real teaching.” Learners get worksheets instead of books. The intention is good — the implementation stalls.
The result: reading dies in the cracks between belief and behaviour.

In this case, a critical part of the literacy mycelium is damaged — trust, courage, collaboration — and must be reconnected.

🛠️ A Blueprint for Restoration

We are not starting from scratch. We already have the blueprint:

📘 The South African National Literacy Strategy and Plan: 2024–2030
It offers:

  • A clear implementation vision

  • Practical, provincial-level guidance

  • A recognition of the complexity of real-life schools and communities

  • A chance to resuscitate the broken parts of our network

But a blueprint means nothing without transformed human beings to bring it to life.

🧭 The Way Forward

That is why this category exists.

Here, officials, educators, librarians, and leaders will find a growing body of resources, courses, and conversations that speak to:

  • 🧠 Adult learning and adaptive mindsets

  • 📚 Kegan’s frameworks for deep transformation

  • 🌍 How to implement the national strategy within each province's unique realities

  • 🌱 How to become stewards of literacy, not just administrators of it

💬 We Are the Mycelium

We are not alone. We are a community — rooted in villages, townships, cities, forests, oceans — connected by an underground wisdom like the mycelium that sustains the world’s oldest trees.

We just need to reconnect, reconfigure, and revive the thread that is Reading and Literacy Development.

This space will help us do that — one courageous step, one course, one mindset shift at a time.

 
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Context

Crisis

Immunity to Change