Malnutrition is the elephant in the room

The recent revelation by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) that nearly 19 million Filipinos who finished high school between 2019 and 2024 are functionally illiterate and cannot effectively comprehend what they read is certainly worrisome.

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Citing results of the PSA’s 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Study (FLEMMS), Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate basic education committee, said the number can even be higher. "There are approximately 5.8 million people who are not basically literate...If you look at functionally illiterate, there are 24.8 million who have problems comprehending," he said.

The functionally illiterate, according to Dr. Karol Mark Yee, executive director of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM), are those unable “to use reading, writing, and numeracy skills ... to understand essential information, such as correctly interpreting dosage instructions on medicine bottles, comprehending utility bills, calculating discounts, or accurately filling out application forms. It’s about reading maps or understanding basic graphs.”

Sen. Gatchalian said DepEd should ensure those who graduate are functionally literate. “The very basic goal of basic education is that students become functionally literate. That's not the case now... In our EDCOM rounds, we have detected kids as old as 15 years old who cannot read a simple story,” he said.

Such a predicament of young Filipinos was earlier seen in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The PISA results showed that 15-year-old Filipino students got a mean score of 340 points in overall reading literacy, much lower than the OECD average of 487 points. The score in mathematics was 353 points and it was 357 points in science. Both scores are way below the OECD average of 489 points.