By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
mandate.”
RA No. 7165 which created in 1991 the Literacy Coordinating Council (LCC), the inter-agency body tasked to coordinate all literacy efforts in the country, provided that the council “submit to Congress an annual report which shall include, among other things, policy recommendations which require legislative action towards the total eradication of illiteracy.” The provision was retained in RA No. 10122 which amended the law in 2010.
For reasons it only knows, the LCC has been sitting on the directive for 33 years now. But while defying the order, and although it is very clear that the law pertains to basic literacy, the LCC has been devoting almost all of its efforts and resources to the development of functional literacy to the gross neglect of its true mandate.
In fairness, the LCC Blueprint for Action which was unveiled in 1997 and remains in effect reveals that on the basis of the then “very high basic literacy rate of almost 94 percent,” the council had broadened the definition of literacy to include functional literacy in its implementation of the law. However, the document also states the following: “However, this does not mean we will not address the needs of some two million Filipinos, mostly members of cultural communities, who still can neither read nor write.”; “Concrete action on the basic literacy campaign is envisioned to be sustained through the initiatory and coordinative effort of the Literacy Coordinating Council…”
The LCC did the very opposite. It stood by as the number of illiterates in the country which stood at 2M in 1997 per the LCC Blueprint for Action had tripled to 6 M by 2019 (2019 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey). By contrast, the population of the country had increased by only 52 percent during the same period.
Aside from laying bare the inadequacy and futility of all of the LCC’s endeavors on basic literacy since 1997, the exponential growth of the country’s illiterate population since then has overthrown the rationale of the LCC’s decision to include functional literacy in its implementation of RA No. 7165. But instead of making the appropriate adjustment in its order of priorities, the council persists in its delusion that developing functional literacy is its main concern.
In a particularly telling evidence of the LCC’s audacious reading of its desired mandate into the law, of the 19 literacy programs which it previously recognized through its National Literacy Awards (NLA) program it introduced in the “Best Practices in Literacy” module in the LCC website, nine are totally devoid of basic literacy development components and another four only deal with the concern glancingly.
The newly added Gawad Matatag category in the NLA recognizes schools for their efforts in the improvement of learning outcomes, in the implementation of Department of Education (DepEd) learning intervention programs and in “financial literacy, health, values and peace education.” The award has no basis in the law whatsoever. With the selection based on National Achievement Test (NAT) scores, neither does the award have any impact on the zero illiteracy target as the NAT is not designed to directly measure basic literacy
Worst, despite the overwhelming evidence, including the recent admission of Undersecretary Gina Gonong, the permanent DepEd representative to the LCC, that there are non-readers in Grades 7-10, the LCC is still in denial about the raging reading crisis in public schools. Tasked by law to provide policy and program directions for all literacy endeavors in the country, the LCC has yet to offer a single proposal for ending the reading crisis.
The ironical explosion of illiteracy during the existence of the LCC would have been forestalled through the legislation of a concrete road map for the attainment of the zero illiteracy target as the same would have forced the council to prioritize the achievement of the goal. The LCC therefore has a lot of explaining to do as to why it has yet to act on the order for it to submit to Congress policy recommendations aimed at the total eradication of illiteracy after three decades. (Published in Letters to the Editor of the February 12, 2025 Philippine Daily Inquirer)
