74th National Book Week

Literacy is defined as the ability of a person to read and write with understanding a simple message in any language or dialect. Due to the quality of education passed on to us by our foreign forefathers, our people have always been regarded as having a high literacy rate. According to the United Nations Development Program Report for 2007/2008, the Philippines is ranked 77th among countries with the highest literacy rates, showing a 92.6 rating. But despite our supposedly high literacy rate, why is it that many of our countrymen are barely able to read and write? Latest statistics tell us that based on a population of 80 million, 6.6 percent or 5.3 million Filipinos cannot read or write.

Perhaps this is the reason why the state of education in our country is in such a sorry state now. Filipinos find it difficult to compete in world economy and so many languish in poverty due to illiteracy. In 1934, American Governor General Frank Murphy, in response to a petition by the Philippine Library Association, designated the period extending from June 18 to 24 of every year as National Book Week. This was aimed primarily at arousing the national interest in reading; and designed to sell the public library to the community by encouraging the people to read and learn from its resources.

In 1936, Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon moved the dates of the annual celebration to November 24 to 30. The National Book Week has since been celebrated within this period annually. This year, the theme is “Ang Batang Palabasa, Dalubhasa sa Kultura”, which connotes that a child who likes to read becomes well-versed in culture.

With the coming of the electronic age, however, people, especially the children, have gradually lost interest in reading. Compared to watching movies and television or playing video games, reading has become such a boring pastime. As a consequence, few Filipinos can hardly express their ideas in  written or spoken language. Worse, the popular texting of messages has produced abbreviated and misspelled set of words. The key to solving this problem is to develop the habit of reading among schoolchildren; in fact, at an even younger age when children are more trainable and docile. We appreciate the fact that many agencies nationwide recognize this problem and have implemented creative reading programs, established community libraries and distributed books and reading materials to schools.

We are now living in a global village and for our country to remain competitive with our foreign neighbors, we have to ensure the competitiveness of our workforce. That is why we have to make sure that our people can get the kind of training and education needed to prepare them for the challenges of the present and the future. A country’s economic performance will always be dependent on how well educated its people are.