ALARMED by several serious problems hounding the country’s educational system, Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon on Monday called for the creation of an educational commission to tackle the state of the Philippine education system.
Drilon likewise urged the crafting of a roadmap that will address the very serious problems that threaten the quality of education in the country as he expressed alarm at the recent study by the World Bank that showed that 9 out of 10 kids aged 10 in the country cannot read.
“I urge the Senate leadership and the House leadership to immediately constitute a body, through an educational commission, which we have done before, in order to provide more long-term solutions to these issues,” Drilon said during the plenary debates on the 2022 budget of the Department of Education.
“I am so sad that this is happening to us,” he said.
The WorldBank recently said that school children in the Philippines struggled with studying remotely due the pandemic which pushed learning poverty in the country to a new high of 90 percent in 2020.
Drilon said the learning poverty is alarming. Reading from the WorldBank report, Drilon said Indonesia has 35.4%; Malaysia, 13.9%; Singapore, 2.8%; Thailand, 23.5%; and Vietnam, 1.7%.
“We beat everybody in this unwelcome data: 9 out of 10 aged 10 would not know how to read,” Drilon said.
Drilon said the Philippines joins Ethiopia at 90.3%; Madagascars, 96.7%; Yemen, 94.7%; Afghanistan, 93.4% at the bottom.
“We are worse than countries like Bangladesh with 51% and Pakistan with 74%,” he noted.
“It is quite alarming. This affects the ability of our future generation to be useful citizens of our country. That should worry our education sector. That should worry the administration. We should give more funds to the education sector,” Drilon said.
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