Apples and oranges, or lemons?

COMMONSENSE

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

Don't compare apples and oranges. This, in gist, was the official rejoinder of the Department of Education (DepEd) over the reported 18.9 million Filipino students classified as "functionally illiterate" even if they graduated from high school.

The reported millions of Filipino high school graduates found to be "functionally illiterate" came out during the public hearing of the Senate committee on basic education last April 30.

Chaired by Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, the Senate committee received this report on the Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in 2024. The PSA's FLEMMS is a nationwide household-based survey conducted every five years since 1989 by virtue of Executive Order 352. The 2024 survey is the seventh in the series of functional literacy surveys following its last round in 2019.

In the 2024 survey, the PSA reported the FLEMMS found that almost 19 million senior high school graduates between 2019 to 2024 were "functionally illiterate," or lacked the capacity to comprehend or understand what they read.

The survey came up with the figure because of the PSA's updated definition of "functional literacy." In the past, the PSA defined "basic literacy" as "the ability of a person to read and write a simple message in any language or dialect with understanding, and to compute or perform basic mathematical operations."

As PSA re-defined it, "functional literacy" is "the ability of a person to read, write, compute and comprehend. In addition to the basic literacy skills, functional literacy includes higher-level comprehension skills, such as integrating two or more pieces of information and making inferences based on the given information."