MUST READ: Literacy advocate receives prestigious award

Elphin Lodge resident Edna Freinkel was honoured with the Continental Lifetime Achiever award for her dedication to fighting illiteracy.

Freinkel, who is in her 80s, remains a vocal literacy advocate but also teaches reading through her registered trust, Readucate, which works mainly in schools and prisons.

She said, “In prisons, literate inmates are trained as instructors so that they can teach illiterate offenders, which means the project has a greater reach and is more sustainable. Both groups become rehabilitated, which is why the Department of Correctional Services would like Readucate to operate in all prisons.”

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The Readucate methods teach people not just to read, but write, spell, comprehend and memorise. People are taught to study successfully. Freinkel said the organisation’s vision is that ‘learning must be a joy’.

Rand Aid spokesperson Cathy Grosvenor said, “Even though South Africa is ranked as one of the most illiterate countries in the world, Readuate’s biggest challenge remains a desperate need for funding. Despite limited funding, Edna and her team have managed to train around 1 500 teachers and prisoners.”

She added, “It has been roughly estimated that about a million children and adults have become fully literate through being trained by these Readucate instructors.

“With adequate resources, Readucate could raise national literacy levels dramatically, thus helping South Africa develop its undoubted potential.”

In 2004, Freinkel received the South African Presidential Award of the Order of Baobab for her lifelong dedication to the development of specialised learning methods, and in 2010 she received the Unisa Outstanding Educator Award.

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Freinkel was inspired by her late mother Rebecca Ostrowiak who she said ‘should have been the one to receive the Order of the Baobab’.

Rebecca Ostrowiak was a literacy pioneer who developed a multi-sensory approach to learning to read and memorise.

“My mom was a teacher in the early 1920s with a special interest in the ‘lame dog’ struggling at the bottom of the class. She was light years ahead of her time in recognising the relationship between home and school performance.”

Ostrowiak’s successes drew attention and calls grew for her to share more widely her methods for transforming non-achievers into fluent readers. Freinkel, then a young adult, dedicated six months of her time to helping her mother capture her methods into a manual.

In 1965, the Teach any Child or Adult to Read series was published and remains highly relevant today. She then decided to dedicate her life to literacy, becoming the only South African to speak at the first World Congress on Dyslexia at the Mayo Clinic in 1974 and serving on the editorial board of the British Dyslexia Association’s journal, Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice.

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Freinkel and her mother also started the Rebecca Ostrowiak School of Reading in Germiston in 1969 until her mother’s death in 1981. Freinkel then trained teachers at the University of South Africa for the Rebecca Ostrowiak Reading Teacher Diploma Course.

Her passion for literacy has been passed down to her daughter Corinne Ossendryver who runs Readucate and helps her mother update the Teach any Child or Adult to Read series.

Details: www.readucate.org