A diploma does not mean you can read

There is something deeply disturbing about the figures discussed in the interview with Dr. Karol Mark Yee: approximately 30 percent of Filipinos are reportedly functionally illiterate. But the more alarming reality is that functional illiteracy does not necessarily end at the school gates, nor does it disappear with a college diploma. Even among university graduates, there are individuals who struggle to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and meaningfully use the information they encounter in everyday life. We have produced graduates who can claim educational credentials but may not possess the fundamental intellectual skills that education is supposed to develop.

What makes this reality particularly unsettling is the contradiction at the heart of our educational system: we continue to celebrate graduation rates while struggling to produce people who can actually make sense of what they read. We hang diplomas on walls, distribute medals, announce academic distinctions, and publish impressive institutional statistics. Yet outside the ceremonies, many Filipinos remain vulnerable to misinformation, manipulation, misleading arguments, and information they cannot adequately process. If a college degree cannot guarantee basic reading comprehension, then we must seriously reconsider what we have been calling educational success.

The interview with Dr. Yee deserves attention because it disrupts the comfortable narrative we have constructed around Philippine education. For decades, we have treated literacy as a matter of recognizing letters, pronouncing words, and completing reading exercises. But reading is not simply the mechanical ability to decode written language. It is the ability to understand arguments, identify underlying assumptions, connect ideas, recognize contradictions, interpret evidence, and make informed judgments. A person may read an entire article without understanding its central argument. Someone may graduate from a university without developing the capacity to distinguish a well-supported claim from an irresponsible opinion. That is the difference between knowing how to read and being genuinely literate.

We should be particularly concerned about a society that confuses schooling with education and credentials with intellectual development. Our schools and universities cannot continue measuring success primarily through enrollment, completion rates, examinations, and graduation statistics while neglecting the actual learning taking place inside classrooms. A student who memorizes information to pass an examination but cannot apply that knowledge outside the classroom has not necessarily acquired an education. A graduate who cannot critically examine a document, interpret public information, or construct a reasoned argument exposes the limitations of an educational system that has mistaken academic compliance for intellectual growth.

The consequences extend far beyond the classroom. We live in an environment where information circulates faster than our capacity to evaluate it. Social media platforms reward outrage, sensationalism, and instant reactions. Political personalities manipulate narratives, influencers package opinions as facts, and fabricated information travels through thousands of accounts before anyone bothers to examine its credibility. In such an environment, functional illiteracy becomes a political vulnerability. Citizens who cannot critically interpret information are easier to mislead, easier to mobilize through manufactured outrage, and easier to convince through slogans that collapse under even the most basic scrutiny. Reading without comprehension creates an audience for propaganda, not an informed public.

Literacy, therefore, is not simply an educational concern. It is a democratic necessity. A citizen who cannot understand the contents of a government announcement, evaluate a candidate’s promises, interpret a public policy, or examine the claims of political leaders is deprived of an important instrument of democratic participation. The ability to read critically is inseparable from the ability to exercise citizenship responsibly. We cannot keep demanding an informed electorate while tolerating an educational environment that fails to develop the very competencies necessary for informed decision-making. Democracy becomes dangerously superficial when people can read political slogans but cannot interrogate the systems and interests behind them.

But before we blame students for their inability to comprehend what they read, we must confront the institutions and conditions that have failed them. Do our public schools have sufficient reading materials? Are libraries acquiring books regularly, or are they merely maintaining collections that have become outdated and irrelevant? Are teachers adequately supported and trained to teach comprehension, critical reading, and interpretation? Are children given access to books that encourage curiosity and independent thinking, or are they confined to worksheets designed primarily to prepare them for standardized examinations? We cannot demand reading proficiency from children while denying them meaningful opportunities to develop a reading life.

As someone involved in teaching and independent publishing, I find this especially troubling. We cannot keep declaring that we want to become a reading nation while treating public libraries as decorative government facilities, books as expensive commodities, and reading programs as occasional activities reserved for commemorative months. A library is not successful simply because its doors are open, its shelves are occupied, or its personnel are present. Its success must also be measured by whether people can find books they genuinely want and need to read. Are the collections relevant to their communities? Are new titles regularly acquired? Are readers consulted? Are libraries actively cultivating reading habits rather than merely preserving books? A library without an active reading culture is little more than a storage facility for books.

We must also confront the economics of reading. For many Filipino families, buying books remains a luxury competing with food, transportation, electricity, and other necessities. It is absurd to demand that children develop strong reading habits when access to books remains unequal and expensive. Government investment in libraries, school collections, community reading spaces, and local publishing should not be treated as an optional cultural expense. It is an investment in the intellectual capacity of the population. If we can allocate enormous resources to infrastructure, we should also recognize that a country needs intellectual infrastructure: accessible libraries, qualified librarians, well-supported teachers, affordable books, and a sustainable publishing ecosystem.

This is also where regional publishing and literature become indispensable. Children in Western Visayas deserve books in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, and other languages they encounter in their homes and communities. Reading development does not happen in a cultural vacuum. Children need stories that recognize their surroundings, characters who resemble people they know, and narratives that speak to their lived experiences. They also need literature that introduces them to unfamiliar worlds and challenges their assumptions. We must abandon the outdated notion that local languages are obstacles to literacy or that meaningful reading can only happen through English and Filipino. Our regional languages are not barriers to intellectual development. They are resources through which children can develop comprehension, imagination, cultural awareness, and confidence as readers.

Independent publishers have an important role in this struggle, but we cannot romanticize the work of publishing while ignoring its economic realities. Small publishers cannot single-handedly compensate for the government’s failure to build a sustainable reading ecosystem. Local books cannot reach the hands of children if public libraries do not purchase them, schools do not integrate them into their collections, and cultural institutions continue overlooking regional literary production. It is contradictory to celebrate linguistic diversity during cultural events while leaving books written in these languages outside the acquisition priorities of public institutions. If we genuinely value our languages, we must fund, publish, distribute, purchase, and read the literature produced in them.

We should also resist turning functional illiteracy into another opportunity to shame students, teachers, and parents. Poverty, overcrowded classrooms, insufficient instructional materials, unequal access to technology, inadequate teacher support, and weak educational policies all contribute to the problem. Teachers cannot be expected to repair every institutional failure through personal sacrifice. Parents cannot be blamed for not purchasing books they cannot afford. Students cannot be held entirely responsible for learning deficiencies that have accumulated over years of inadequate educational support. The crisis is systemic, and the responsibility must be shared by the institutions that formulate policies, allocate budgets, manage schools, and determine educational priorities.

The most uncomfortable implication of Dr. Yee’s interview is that we may have become too satisfied with the appearance of an educated population. We have learned to celebrate the diploma rather than examine the competence it supposedly represents. We congratulate ourselves for producing graduates without adequately examining whether they can independently understand the world around them. We measure educational achievement through numbers that are easy to report while overlooking intellectual abilities that are much harder to cultivate. The result is an illusion of literacy: a society that appears educated on paper but remains dangerously vulnerable when confronted with complex information, competing arguments, and difficult realities.

We do not need more graduates who merely know how to pass examinations. We need people who can read beyond the headline, recognize manipulation, challenge institutional authority, examine political rhetoric, understand public policies, and defend their positions with evidence. We need schools that cultivate independent thinkers rather than obedient examination-takers. We need universities that produce critical citizens rather than merely credentialed individuals. And we need public libraries that function as democratic spaces where people encounter ideas, challenge assumptions, and develop the intellectual independence necessary to participate meaningfully in society.

A nation that cannot read critically becomes a nation that can be deceived repeatedly. Its citizens may possess diplomas, its institutions may boast impressive statistics, and its leaders may celebrate educational achievements, but none of these can conceal the consequences of an education that fails to teach people how to understand. The real measure of literacy is not how many words we can pronounce, how many pages we can finish, or how many degrees we can accumulate. It is whether we can make sense of the world, recognize when we are being manipulated, and refuse to accept claims simply because someone has presented them as truth.

The real tragedy is that millions of Filipinos struggle with reading comprehension, while we have built an educational culture capable of producing graduates but unwilling to confront the persistence of this crisis. We have normalized the appearance of achievement and become less demanding about its substance. Until we stop confusing diplomas with intelligence, schooling with learning, and the ability to read words with the capacity to understand them, we will continue producing an educated-looking society that remains dangerously ill-equipped to think critically. The Philippines does not simply need more people who can read. It needs more people who understand what they are reading—and have the courage to act on what they understand.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.