The cost of literacy crisis

By Herman M. Lagon

A Grade 7 student reads a paragraph from his Science textbook. Then he reads it again. And once more. “Do you understand it?” the teacher asks. The student gives a small, uncertain smile. He knows how to read the words. What he cannot quite do is make sense of them.

And there, in that ordinary classroom moment, is a much bigger problem. That silence may be one of the most important sounds in Philippine education today.

Education keeps changing around our children. Curricula come and go. School calendars shift. We debate mother tongue and English, gadgets and textbooks, and now artificial intelligence. But one painfully familiar problem has stayed with us: too many children are growing older in school without becoming stronger, more confident readers.

And the numbers tell a troubling story. Based on DepEd assessment data from 2023 to 2025, EDCOM 2 reported proficiency or high proficiency among only 30.52 percent of Grade 3 learners. By Grade 6, it was 19.56 percent. In Grade 10, 1.36 percent. By Grade 12, only 0.40 percent—or roughly four out of every 1,000 learners—demonstrated the expected skills in problem-solving, handling information, communicating ideas, and analyzing data.

One caution is important. These assessments involve different cohorts, so they should not be read as though the same children were tracked from Grade 3 to Grade 12. EDCOM 2 itself makes that qualification. Still, taken together, the results offer a disturbing snapshot of how little mastery our learners are demonstrating across the system.

The reading figures make the picture even harder to ignore. Nearly half of learners in Grades 1 to 3 were not reading at their respective grade levels at the end of school year 2024–2025. By the time children enter Grade 7, 88 percent are reportedly not grade-level ready in reading. Even among junior high school students, 40 to 52 percent are at least two grade levels behind.

As a teacher, numbers like these eventually acquire faces.

It is the student who says, “Sir, pwede i-explain liwat?” not because he was not listening, but because the language of the problem itself defeated him. It is the student who can define acceleration but cannot explain it through a speeding jeepney. Or the college freshman with good ideas that somehow get lost on paper. Sometimes, a learner understands perfectly in a familiar language but struggles to express the same thought in English.

Clearly, this is more than an “English problem.” English proficiency matters enormously. It remains important in higher education, science, technology, diplomacy, international work, and industries where Filipinos have long competed successfully. Weakness in English can close doors that previous generations of Filipino professionals worked hard to open.

English can open many doors for our children. But Filipino and our mother tongues are often the languages through which they first learned to understand the world.

A child may struggle to explain in English something he understands deeply in Hiligaynon. We should not mistake difficulty with words for difficulty with thinking. The hope is not for one language to replace another, but for every new language to give the child another door to the world.

That is worth remembering in the mother-tongue debate. Some say it limited exposure to English. Others point to children learning better when lessons begin in a language they understand well. Perhaps both sides remind us of something important: there is no one-line solution to something as deeply human as language. Implementation matters: teacher proficiency, suitable materials, actual community languages, transition strategies, and enough instructional time.

There is another uncomfortable truth. A language cannot be learned well if children barely read. In 2024, 42 percent of Filipino Grade 5 learners were sharing a reading textbook and another 7 percent had none. Only 52 percent had their own copy, down from 92 percent in 2019. Sometimes we make education sound terribly complicated. But a child still needs something very basic: something good to read and enough time to read it.

That is how we learn language. We read. We speak. We write. We get a word wrong. Someone helps us. We try again. Little by little, confidence grows.

I have taught students who had plenty to say but were afraid to say it in English because somebody might laugh at their grammar. When children become afraid of mistakes, they eventually become afraid of speaking at all.

Perhaps we need classrooms where mistakes are corrected without humiliation. Let the child speak. Ask another question. Help her find the better word. Show him why the sentence does not quite work. Then let him try again. Language is not learned by waiting until one can speak perfectly.

The same applies to reading. Before saying, “Read twenty pages,” perhaps we should first ask, “Can the student really understand two?” Before asking for another reaction paper, can learners tell us what they read, what the evidence says, and what they themselves think?

That may sound simple. It isn’t. These are the skills everything else depends on.

And their value goes far beyond grades. The PSA’s 2024 survey found that nearly 30 percent of Filipinos aged 10 to 64 struggle with functional literacy or comprehension. Eventually, that struggle reaches real life: medicine labels, expenses, written instructions, job applications, and government forms.

That is where literacy stops being merely an education statistic. It becomes the construction worker trying to understand a safety instruction. The mother reading the dosage on her child’s medicine. The farmer interpreting an advisory. The voter deciding whether a viral post is credible. The job applicant filling out a form. The employee reading an email from a foreign client. The citizen trying to understand what he is being asked to sign.

And now there is AI. Never has the ability to read critically mattered more. A student can ask a chatbot to write an essay in seconds. But if that student cannot judge whether the answer is accurate, biased, fabricated, shallow, or simply nonsense written in polished English, technology has not solved the literacy problem. It has hidden it behind better grammar.

That should worry us more than whether students can produce perfect sentences. We need young Filipinos who can read something and ask, Does this make sense? Who is saying this? Where is the evidence? What is missing? Can I explain this in my own words?

Those questions belong in Science, Mathematics, Social Studies, Technology, and even Physical Education—not only in English and Filipino classes. Every teacher, in some sense, teaches language because every discipline asks students to make meaning.

There are encouraging signs. The ARAL Program is intended to provide remediation for struggling learners, while curriculum reforms are trying to reduce overloaded content and give greater attention to foundational skills. There are reasons to hope. At one Marikina elementary school cited by EDCOM 2, the share of Grades 1 to 3 learners who were developing, transitioning, or grade-level ready rose from 57.26 percent to 94.03 percent by midyear. It is one school, yes, but it reminds us that children can catch up.

Perhaps that is where hope begins—not with another big announcement, but with believing that struggling readers can still become confident ones.

Give teachers fewer distractions from teaching. Put appropriate books in children’s hands. Strengthen libraries. Diagnose reading difficulties early. Give struggling learners time without branding them as failures. Help teachers become better teachers of reading across subjects. Let children encounter English, Filipino, and their home languages as bridges to understanding rather than territories adults keep fighting over.

Most of all, let us stop confusing finishing school with truly learning. Twelve years should give a young person more than grades and a diploma. They should give the ability to read with understanding, think independently, communicate clearly, and keep learning long after graduation.

We have become very good at counting years in school. Perhaps it is time to ask what those years actually gave our children Perhaps the better question is what they carry with them when they leave.

Because literacy follows them everywhere—to work, to the doctor’s clinic, to the voting booth, and into the decisions they make for themselves and their families.

No Filipino child should spend twelve years learning to read, only to leave school still struggling to read the world.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.