What to Do with 18M Illiterate Youths?

Functionally illiterate--it's when you have poor reading and writing skills that make you unable to cope with daily life and employment tasks beyond basic levels. If you can't read you can't solve math problems. Perhaps, you can read simple sentences and understand basic vocabulary, but struggle with more complex texts or tasks. So you have difficulties in areas like understanding medication instructions, reading food labels, buying things and managing money, or comprehending legal documents.

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Recently, the Department of Education said there are probably 18M high school grads (or more) suffering from functional illiteracy, and we wonder how they managed to finish high school or how they'd deal with college. This needs serious looking into, but more needful is what we're going to do with 18 million illiterate youths? The problem is already there. How do we help them?

Give Them Other Specializations

Someone said we can channel them to other careers or vocations that do not need literacy, like those that rely on manual skills than literacy. But they'd be tied up to blue collar jobs with little to zero chances for job promotion. Everyone should have access to a better job status or quality of life. And I can't think of any job that does not involve some literacy skills. Like, we all have to be able to tell time. 

Even house helpers, baby-sitters, construction workers and the like need to read product labels and do some math. I once saw a sitcom where an illiterate boy helper was able to buy items from a grocery store because his boss drew on paper the things he needed to buy. The problem is if the boss can't draw things accurately and the helper mistakes one item for another different thing?

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Online Remedial Classes

While doing jobs requiring only manual skills, the high school they came from should offer FREE online remedial classes devoted solely for improving their reading, writing and math skills. Some kind of a follow-up schooling. Or perhaps the government can provide them, via Tesda maybe? After passing the course and given a certificate, they can do other better-paying jobs or businesses that involve more than basic literacy.

Literacy all starts with reading and comprehension. And then phonetics. Then writing. With reading and comprehension, math will be made easier. This is why reading is so important, especially today when majority of young people prefer watching videos and movies than reading books. You also analyze thoughts and ideas when watching videos but not like the analytical skills demanded when reading. The mind and imagination are stretched a lot more when reading books. According to the Professional Leadership Institute:

Reading on the other hand is interactive. You have to form mental pictures and focus on translating shapes on a page into ideas in your mind. The medium makes you a stronger, more disciplined thinker regardless of the content.

While the same source says of watching videos:

Video is usually disjointed pieces of mental flotsam floating through cyberspace. This format feeds and exacerbates your monkey mind; that part of your brain that chatters and swings from idea to idea with no pattern or discipline. 

 

Reading is the Answer

The 18 million functionally illiterate youths must be helped with basic reading and then inspired to read books. This is the first remedy. Provide them easy access to online reading modules, interview them online to assess their progress, and give them literacy certificates after passing the interview. Then strongly encourage them to make reading a lifetime habit. How? By making reading rewarding. Like, assigning them more books to read, pass interviews that assess their comprehension and speaking skills, and get advanced certificates which will give them chances for job promotions. 

Interviewing them online on the books they have read and basing their grades on how they express themselves literately will definitely save the functionally illiterate from a doomed future. DEPED can schedule 15-minute online interviews for willing participants. This way, the 18 million or so young people can be helped a lot to make up for the loss. 

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