In the meantime, almost eight out of 10 children in Grade 4 cannot understand what they read. There, right there, is South Africa's problem - not fixing the present or preparing for the future, but obsessing about a stone that has long lost its political currency, as the Rhodes University Council understood when it recently voted by a majority to keep the name of this little island of education excellence in an otherwise barren Eastern Cape. Predictably, a group of student leaders threw a fit about what they named UCKAR - the University Currently Known as Rhodes.

Great nations invest in prospective knowledge. When I travel around the world, and especially in Silicon Valley, where I am invited to teach at high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, I find children learning about automated intelligence, robotics, neurobiology and applied mathematics; some schools make learning to code a curriculum requirement.

In smart countries, from India to Singapore, young people grapple with the knowledge they require for a future that has radically been altered by new technologies.

This is what South Africans fail to grasp - that social justice is just as much about positioning our youth for the future as it might be about correcting the past. When I made this point about our national failure to attend to prospective knowledge, one man from a Cape Town audience responded to the effect that: "That's nice, but we have much more basic problems."

Imagine we used that argument against mobile phones when they arrived on the scene - the one technology that has opened up communication for the poor in the deep rural areas of the country and democratised connectivity among activists during social protest movements. Time and again our default reaction when faced with prospective knowledge is to retract into our pity pool of past grievances; corrective knowledge, in other words.