A 2016 ministerial task team found that, like in Mexico, the country’s largest teacher union, the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu), ‘is in de facto charge of the management, administration and priorities of education’ in ‘six and possibly more of the nine provinces’. The general silence at the shocking state of our education system has, thankfully, been punctuated by the results of the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls). The question now is whether the outrage will be followed by action.