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With one of the highest literacy rates in Southeast Asia, how did the Philippines manage to foster such a rise, and what else needs to be done?
a as an enthusiastic reader and a writing teacher at the University of the Philippines, it always surprises me whenever I have a student who tells me, "I don't like reading."
When asked why, the usual answer ranges from "It's boring" to "I'm too lazy to read." And yet, my students right now are the products of a confluence of elements that created a successful national literacy program. As Frederick Perez, the current secretary of the Reading Association of the Philippines, says, "Literacy education is the primary factor that caused this development in our country. More educators have become more convinced that reading is the baseline in the education of the youth."
The Philippines boasts a consistent functional literacy rate of 95.6% as of 2008, according to the National Statistics Office's Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS), which collects data every five years. While the 2013 data is still being processed, according to the 2008 results, almost 9 out of 10 Filipinos are functionally literate.
Furthermore, according to the 2010 National Census, 97.5% of the entire population of 68 million Filipinos holds a basic literacy level-this in a country with English and Filipino as official joint languages, along with 13 indigenous languages and more than 180 distinct languages spoken across the regions, and their derivative dialects.
Recovery and rebuilding
In 1989, the Census recorded functional literacy in the Philippines at 75.4%. The country was recovering from Martial Law, and the lack of freedom of information and education was a continuing struggle for the average Filipino.
According to a 2012 article entitled "Martial law and the miseducation of our youth," written by Dr. Ricardo Ma. Duran Nolasco, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Philippines, "[Ferdinand] Marcos saw the education system as his primary...