MANILA — For a child rights group, the recent survey which revealed that 18 million high school graduates may be functionally illiterate is unacceptable. 

This was revealed during the Senate Committee on Basic Education hearing last April 30, and was based on the initial results of the latest Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). In its latest iteration, the definition of “functional literacy” includes higher-level comprehension skills beyond basic reading, writing, and numeracy. 

EDCOM 2, the congressional body tasked with conducting a comprehensive national assessment of the Philippine education sector, states that the 2019 definition automatically categorized high school graduates or junior high school completers as functionally literate, while the 2024 definition does not.

The FLEMMS is a national survey administered by the PSA that gathers information on the basic and functional literacy rates, and the educational skills qualifications of the population. 

Former ACT Teachers Party-list representative and current nominee Antonio Tinio said that the provinces with the highest functional illiteracy rates have the highest poverty incidence. “This is not coincidental. When children cannot read with comprehension, they are effectively locked out of opportunities for social mobility and economic advancement,” he said.

For Salinlahi Alliance for Children’s Concerns, the survey reveals government neglect. 

“The education sector is underfunded because the government is not keen on changing the colonial and commercialized orientation of our education system,” Trixie Manalo, youth spokesperson of Salinlahi, said in Filipino. 

She added that functional illiteracy is not the only alarming reality about the education crisis in the Philippines. “We have 159,000 backlogs in classrooms, 86,000 shortage of teachers, almost half of public schools do not have principals, 5,000 schools do not have electricity, and 10,000 schools do not have access to clean water.”

To address this issue, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) – Philippines proposes to double the current budgetary allocation in the education sector. The current P965.26-billion budget in 2025 amounts only to 3.6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), significantly short of the 6 percent recommendation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“Doubling the education budget is the necessary first step in addressing the grave inadequacies in our education infrastructure, technology, materials, and personnel—including the provision of decent salaries and adequate benefits to teachers and staff,” said ACT Philippines.

During the Senate hearing, the Department of Education (DepEd)’s Bureau of Learning Delivery presented its initiatives to address the gaps. These include the continued implementation of the revised K to 12 curriculum, strengthening the Early Language, Literacy, and Numeracy (ELLNA) Program, learning loss remediation and gender-responsive interventions, and the implementation of the ARAL Program, the implementing rules of which were signed in December 2024.

While it is a welcome development for the EDCOM 2 and the DepEd to recognize the problems in the education sector, Manalo said that the problem is deeply rooted in the orientation of education in the country.

“The education system functions to produce a large number of cheap laborers for the benefit of foreign entities and big businesses, not really for the genuine development of Filipinos,” Manalo said in Filipino. “Let’s remember that the K-12 program was introduced in the first place as part of the Structural Adjustment Program to secure loans for the Philippines from the Asian Development Bank. Even the implementation of other initiatives like Catch-Up Fridays follows that same framework.”

Both the children and teachers group have underscored the need to establish an education system that is nationalist, scientific, and mass oriented by ensuring that basic literacy should be learned primarily through national and local languages, more place for Philippine history and culture, and teaching methods that develop critical thinking for students to be evaluative, creative, and innovative. 

“The severity of the problem warrants an urgent response from Filipino voters as we face the 2025 elections: Education must be one of the top electoral issues,” ACT Philippines said. “Voters should choose candidates who support the doubling of the education budget, the wage increase of education workers, the nationalist reorientation of the general curriculum, and the upholding of academic freedom.” (RTS, RVO)