EDITORIAL - Functionally illiterate

According to the latest Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey released by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), an estimated 21% of those who graduated senior high school, or one in five graduates, are functionally illiterate or cannot understand simple text.

The findings were revealed during a Senate basic education committee hearing last April 30.

We recently are able to distill functional literacy by highest grade completed, and we note that only 79% of senior high school graduates in the K-12 are functional literate, meaning there's around 21% who are not able," a Philstar.com report quotes Adrian Cerezo, assistant national statistician of PSA's social sector statistics service, as saying.

As figures go, one out of five isn’t really that bad --until you consider the fact that these are senior high school graduates already.

How were they able to finish senior high school without learning to understand what they read? For that matter, how were they able to finish elementary without basic reading comprehension?

Is this a problem of some students just being allowed to proceed to the next level and the one after that without first completing all the requirements? Or an issue with the “overloaded” curriculum? Or does the issue lie in some of the students themselves?

Being able to understand what one is reading is crucial to get further in life. There are those who think that they may be able to get through life without reading, and to some extent they may be right. But then again think about what happens when they are confronted with a warning label on medicine, or a nutritional label on food, or a warning sign, or an instruction manual.

Reading is an everyday skill. We don’t even have to mention that pursuit of higher education or better-paying jobs requires a high degree of literacy.

While the PSA has put forward their findings, as to why this is so isn’t quite clear yet. The reason why a fifth of our senior high school graduates cannot understand what they read should be determined and addressed as soon as possible.