If the nation cannot read, what are we doing in the university?

By Noel Galon de Leon

Some statistics should make us stop. Not because we cannot understand the numbers, but because once we truly understand what they mean, we may no longer be able to look at education in the same way. One of these is the result of the Department of Education’s pilot Senior High School Literacy and Numeracy Assessment conducted in March 2026. Of the approximately 1.4 million Grade 11 learners assessed from an estimated 1.9 million learners nationwide, only 12.58 percent reached the Independent reading level. Fewer than two out of every ten learners assessed could read and understand texts expected at their grade level without assistance. Meanwhile, 58.9 percent were classified at the Frustration level, and 28.5 percent were at the Instructional level. Taken together, the figures suggest that approximately 87 percent of the Grade 11 learners assessed were not yet independent readers. These numbers should disturb anyone who still believes that literacy is simply another educational concern that can be postponed, delegated, or discussed only during Reading Month.

This is not simply a disappointing examination result. It is a national alarm. Before we dismiss these figures as another collection of statistics, we need to ask what it actually means for a Grade 11 student not to be an independent reader. It does not necessarily mean that the student cannot recognize words or read sentences aloud. A learner may pronounce every word in a paragraph and even read quickly. The deeper question is whether the learner understands what is being read. Can the learner identify the main idea, make inferences, understand relationships between arguments, summarize a complex text, and arrive at an independent conclusion? More importantly, can the learner question a text instead of accepting everything written in it as truth? If the answer remains uncertain, then we are confronting a problem far deeper than pronunciation, vocabulary, or test scores.

For years, we have said that the Philippines has a reading crisis. Perhaps it is time to stop using the word crisis as a fashionable diagnosis. Crisis is a powerful word because it creates the appearance of urgency, yet urgency does not always lead to action. We produce posters about reading. We celebrate Reading Month. We organize book drives. We photograph children holding books. We establish reading corners and place bookshelves in public spaces. All these efforts may be worthwhile, but we need to ask a more uncomfortable question. If reading truly matters to us, how did we reach a point where approximately 87 percent of the Grade 11 learners assessed were not yet independent readers? At what point did our celebrations become more visible than our interventions, and our activities more frequent than our long-term solutions?

I am not suggesting that teachers are doing nothing. This crisis should not be placed on the shoulders of teachers as if they alone are responsible for a failure produced by an entire system. It is easy to blame the teacher inside the classroom while the system fails to provide sufficient time, resources, training, support, and working conditions for meaningful teaching. Teachers face large classes, administrative requirements, learners with widely different abilities, limited learning materials, and numerous responsibilities that have little to do with actual teaching. Neither should we discuss literacy as if the problem were simply a lack of motivation among young people. Literacy is connected to poverty, access to books, language, family, schools, technology, nutrition, the quality of teaching, and the kind of culture we create as a society.

Yet as someone who teaches and works in the academy, I cannot simply look at the Department of Education and say that this is their problem. It is not. It is also ours. It is a problem for colleges and universities. It is a problem for faculty members who teach literacy, reading, language, writing, and literature. It is a problem for departments and academic offices that claim to have a mandate to strengthen language and education. It is also a problem for institutions that continue to receive students from an educational system with deep literacy gaps while expecting them to immediately cope with the demands of academic life the moment they enter the university. We cannot continue acting as though the university begins where the problems of basic education end.

Sometimes the academy is too comfortable with its own intelligence. We hold conferences on literacy. We produce research papers about reading. We develop frameworks, theories, methodologies, and intervention models. We can lecture about Paulo Freire, critical literacy, reader-response theory, multiliteracies, decolonial pedagogy, and many other important concepts. These ideas matter, and academic research matters. But there is a more uncomfortable question that we need to confront. How far does the literacy work of the academy actually reach? Does it remain inside the classroom, inside research papers, inside conference presentations, or inside publications read primarily by other academics? Knowledge becomes increasingly difficult to defend as socially meaningful when it repeatedly circulates among experts while the communities being studied continue to struggle with the problems that research claims to understand.

If the academy is serious about literacy, it is not enough to become an expert in describing the problem. It must also become part of the solution. This is where the current data personally challenges me. As a faculty member and as the Faculty-in-Charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office, I cannot simply read these numbers and continue doing things as they have always been done. It is not enough to say that we have a language program. It is not enough that we offer language courses. It is not enough to teach English, Filipino, Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and other languages while assuming that this alone fulfills a larger responsibility to literacy. A university program must continually ask whether its work responds to the realities outside its office and classrooms.

The question confronting me is simple to ask but difficult to answer. What can the UP Visayas Language Program Office do not only to study the reading crisis but also to actively confront it? I do not claim to have a complete answer, and perhaps the first step is admitting that we do not yet have enough answers. However, I believe that we need to begin thinking more boldly. What if a university like UP Visayas developed an institutional literacy initiative that extended beyond its own students? What if we created reading intervention programs with schools that partner with the university? What if faculty members, pre-service teachers, language teachers, researchers, and students worked together to build a literacy ecosystem instead of carrying out isolated and temporary projects?

A serious UP Visayas Reading and Literacy Initiative could be one place to begin. It should not be ceremonial. It should not exist only during National Reading Month or Language Month. It could conduct literacy mapping among partner schools and communities, provide teachers with training on reading comprehension strategies, and develop contextualized reading materials in Filipino and languages used in Western Visayas. It could establish reading clinics for learners who need intensive support and create a space where academic research returns directly to schools and communities through actual interventions. Research should not always end with a publication, a conference presentation, or a curriculum vitae entry. If we are studying problems experienced by actual communities, we must also ask whether our research produces anything that those communities can actually use.

Language must also be part of this conversation. We cannot discuss literacy in the Philippines as if every learner has the same linguistic experience. Some children grow up speaking Hiligaynon at home. Others speak Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Cebuano, Waray, Ilokano, Tagalog, Tausug, and many other Philippine languages. When they enter school, they may encounter Filipino and English as the primary languages of academic instruction. If we fail to understand the relationship between the mother tongue, language transition, comprehension, and academic language, we may design literacy interventions that fail before they even begin. A reading intervention that ignores the linguistic reality of the learner risks becoming another standardized solution imposed on people whose experiences are anything but standard.

For this reason, I believe that one important contribution of a university language program is to develop literacy initiatives that are not blind to language. Language should not be treated simply as a medium through which information passes from teacher to student. It is a way of thinking and understanding the world. It carries history, memory, culture, and identity. If we want learners to become better readers, we need to ask not only what they are reading but also in which language they are able to think and understand most deeply. We need to take seriously the possibility that comprehension is affected by the distance between the language of the text and the language through which learners make sense of their own lives.

However, simply providing more books is not enough. This is another issue we need to examine more critically. Access to books is essential, and there is no question about that. As someone who has long believed in bringing books closer to communities, I understand the importance of libraries, bookstores, reading centers, and alternative spaces for reading. Yet literacy cannot be solved simply by placing a bookshelf inside a room. Books have to be read, and what is read has to be understood. Understanding itself has to be developed through practice, discussion, questioning, interpretation, and even disagreement. Learners need opportunities to argue with a text instead of merely being trained to identify the correct answer expected by an examination.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest problems in the way we think about reading. We have turned it into a largely solitary activity and then blamed young people when they do not voluntarily embrace it. We tell them to read more books and spend less time on their phones. We sometimes speak as if the problem is simply the laziness of the younger generation. Yet a genuine reading culture is also a social culture. It develops when people talk about what they read, when a teacher asks not only what happened in a story but why the story matters in the life of the learner, and when a child can see their language, community, family, and experiences reflected in a text. Reading becomes meaningful when it is not treated as punishment or simply another requirement for an examination.

This is also where I believe UP Visayas must become more ambitious. As a public university, our literacy work should not be confined within the campus. We can imagine the university as a literacy laboratory open to the community. We can develop regular reading camps, create mobile literacy programs, and build stronger partnerships with public schools and local government units. We can bring together the expertise of different colleges and academic units to develop an interdisciplinary response. We can involve university students in meaningful literacy work as part of their educational and civic engagement. The university has resources that many communities do not possess, and those resources become difficult to justify when they remain inaccessible to the very public that supports public education.

I also believe that literacy intervention should not be treated as charity. We are not entering communities to save children who are poor readers. We should not arrive with books, take photographs of ourselves reading stories to children, post them online, and mistake visibility for transformation. Literacy work is a responsibility of a society that claims to value education and democracy. A person who cannot fully understand what they read may become more vulnerable to misleading headlines, propaganda, manipulated videos, fabricated quotations, and political disinformation. The literacy crisis is not simply an education crisis. It is also a crisis of democracy because the ability to understand, question, compare, and evaluate information is essential to citizenship.

How can a citizen make an informed political decision if they struggle to understand complex information? How can they make sense of public policy, evaluate candidates, recognize misinformation, or fight for their rights if they cannot fully understand the documents that explain those rights? When we discuss the reading crisis, we should not be concerned only because a learner might fail an entrance examination or struggle in college. We should be concerned because literacy has a direct relationship with the kind of citizens we produce and the kind of country we become. A democracy cannot depend only on people having access to information. It also depends on their ability to understand what information is telling them and recognize when someone is deliberately trying to deceive them.

So yes, this is a challenge for the Department of Education, but it is also a challenge for us. It is a challenge for those in colleges and universities. It is a challenge for those who teach reading, literature, writing, and language. It is a challenge for researchers who study literacy and for libraries, publishers, writers, parents, and communities. Most importantly, it is a challenge for institutions that possess expertise and resources but have not always found ways to transform those advantages into sustained public action. It is also a challenge for me because holding a position connected to language education means very little if that position does not force me to confront the realities surrounding language and literacy.

I do not want our response to this data to be limited to a meeting that ends with a resolution. I do not want it to become another webinar with an attractive poster and a collection of screenshots. I do not want us to organize a one-day activity, distribute certificates, publish photographs, and then wait for the next alarming report about literacy. What we need is a program with continuity, clear objectives, a strong research component, meaningful community partnerships, adequate resources, and above all, institutional commitment. The problem with many well-intentioned initiatives is not that they begin badly but that they disappear after the excitement of their launch.

Perhaps we need to begin by asking what we can do now with the resources we already have. Who can we work with? Which schools can we support? What literacy materials are missing in Western Visayas? How can regional languages support comprehension? How can we prepare future teachers not simply to follow lesson plans but to become literacy workers who can respond to the actual needs of their learners? How can university research produce genuine change inside classrooms rather than simply generating another set of findings? These questions may not immediately produce a national solution, but refusing to ask them guarantees that we will remain where we are.

I do not believe UP Visayas can solve the reading crisis in the Philippines. No single university can. Yet we cannot use the scale of the problem as an excuse for doing nothing. An institution may not be able to transform the entire educational system, but it can begin with a model. It can demonstrate that a longer, deeper, and more organized literacy intervention is possible. It can show how universities, schools, teachers, students, writers, publishers, libraries, and communities can work together. Sometimes institutions wait for a perfect national policy before acting, when meaningful change may begin precisely because someone decides that the existing situation is already unacceptable.

Perhaps the most important question we should ask ourselves is this. If we already know that there is a reading crisis, why do we continue behaving as if everything is normal? It is not normal for such a large number of learners to reach senior high school while still requiring support to fully understand texts that they are expected to read independently. It is not normal to continue increasing academic requirements while some students struggle to understand the instructions for those very requirements. It is not normal to construct buildings and laboratories while failing to invest seriously and consistently in literacy. It is not normal to celebrate academic excellence while so many young people remain excluded from one of the most fundamental skills that gives them access to knowledge.

The reading crisis is not someone else’s problem. It is not only the problem of elementary school teachers. It is not only the problem of the Department of Education. It is not only the problem of underfunded schools, and it is certainly not only the problem of learners classified at the Frustration level. It is the problem of everyone who claims to believe in the value of education. If those of us inside universities have access to researchers, teachers, students, libraries, knowledge, and institutional resources but still cannot imagine concrete and sustained ways to respond, then perhaps we also need to ask ourselves what the purpose of our academic work really is.

The numbers are now in front of us. The crisis is no longer a whisper, an anecdote, or simply an observation made by a teacher inside a classroom. The data give us a clearer picture of the scale of the problem, even if the numbers themselves cannot capture every individual story behind them. The question is no longer whether the Philippines has a reading crisis. We already know that it does. The more difficult question is what we are willing to do to ensure that it does not become normal for a country to educate young people who may still struggle to understand what they read, who can read words without fully understanding ideas, and who may graduate without being fully prepared to engage critically with the texts they need to participate meaningfully in society.

For me, being concerned is no longer enough. Concern without action can easily become another comfortable position for those of us in the academy. We can acknowledge the problem, discuss the data, write papers about it, and still return to our ordinary routines as though someone else will eventually solve it. But if institutions like ours cannot begin imagining concrete and sustained responses, then we have to ask what our expertise is ultimately for. We may not be able to solve the entire crisis, but we can refuse to accept it as normal. And perhaps that is where meaningful work must begin, inside institutions like our own and then beyond them, where the real consequences of literacy and illiteracy are lived every day.

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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 Office 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.