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Let's face it. The Philippines is in an alarming situation: a steady decline of literacy among our youth. In various studies, poor school performance was traced to some factors which include inadequate skills and formal mechanisms for teachers to handle children with learning difficulties such as poor reading. With poor reading comes poor learning. Worse, the problem of poor or nonreading lies at the heart of why the Philippines is so uncompetitive in the world economy and why so many of our people continue to live in poverty or barely escape it. Poor reading is also a reflection of poor language proficiency, whether this is an English or in the national language. One sees this immediately in the language proficiency of public school teachers. The KEY to learning is better reading skills. Children, if they are to make progress in their education, in their career and in life generally, mus learn to ready fluently and well. They must learn to read without difficulties or problems. The skill of reading is a child's passport to future work and leisure. Presently, our government, through its agencies, try to address the problem of deteriorating literacy condition but unfortunately, these efforts are not enough. Clearly, a system wide approach to literacy, reading and learning has to be implemented if we are to claim true literacy and become competitive workforce. |
