By Dr. Joachim Antonio
Functional Illiteracy and Education
I first encountered the term “alliteracy” in the mid 2000s. It referred to the state of knowing how to read but not wanting to. Searching further where this has originated, I discovered that this phenomenon was already observable all the way back to the 1970s. As I am writing this in 2025, I do a bit of math and I realize that practically fifty years have passed since the phenomenon was first recorded. I reflect a bit further and I realize that the problem goes further back than that. We think of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham (1957) and the works he responded to: John Hersey’s “Why Do Students Bog Down on First R? A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading” (1954) and Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955). The phenomenon of knowing how to read but not wanting to can be traced as far back as the 1950s, almost seventy-five years ago. Functional literacy–which is supposed to include higher-level comprehension skills, going beyond basic reading, writing, and numeracy, as the definition used by the Philippine Statistics Authority–seems to be severely lacking.
Given that, even as late as 2025, 18 million Filipino high school graduates have been deemed as functional illiterate, we must acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong with how we’ve generally been approaching the problem for almost a century.
Even without the statistics doing the job, functional illiteracy is easily observable for me, a literature teacher in college for almost nineteen years. I find it ironic, for example, how many students would rather read supplementary readings about the assigned reading instead of just wrestling with the assigned reading itself. I have observed how students are overly eager to share their interpretations of the text but are visibly flustered when asked about how they feel about different aspects about their reading.
More importantly, when asked directly about their attitude towards reading, majority of my GE students admit to either disliking reading, being indifferent to it, or their attitude depending on what they have to read. As early as this point, the signs of alliteracy are prevalent. They know how to read but will not unless they have to. The reasons they give are usually the following: that they are more of visual or auditory learners, that they find “deep words” difficult, that they struggle with “deeper meaning.”
The most eye-opening response I’ve received over the years was something like this: “I used to like reading until we were given too many and made to rush through them in high school and college.”
This struck me because this was something I also went through, when I was a college student myself. There was one time when I was nauseated with all my college readings that I decided to take a break. I took out a novel that I hadn’t finished yet and… I told myself, wait a minute; how is reading this novel a rest from reading classroom handouts? What makes things worse is that I eventually learned that reading is indeed only one way of learning. I learned to rely on learning in ways other than reading for class; I preserved my reading energies for reading what I really wanted to read. In some ways, I am lucky, because I found this strategy for myself. I was able to preserve my love for reading. But looking back at it now, it also revealed another harsh reality: I discovered that there are cases when reading is only optional to learning. Synthesizing my personal experience now with my observations in class, I have good reason to suspect that my students have discovered the same.
It’s all well and good for those who’ve learned to love reading early on. In a way, the love for reading is still present, just not so much in the classroom context. And that is okay. We cannot constrict the reading activity to just a matter of love.
But what about those who’ve grown up not liking reading, like most of my students?
Undoubtedly, they know how to read. They understand the importance of reading. But their appreciation for reading is merely a functional one, merely pragmatic. They understand that reading is crucial in getting by in life, in getting an educational degree, in day to day activities, in attaining success.
But this viewpoint is tragic at best and catastrophic at worst. The benefits mentioned are just peripheral byproducts of reading, dependent more on content and context, rather than stemming directly from the activity itself. If these are the only benefits of reading, then there is good reason to avoid reading when possible. If the sole benefit of reading is the content of the text in the context of the academic system, then other ways of gaining the same content should be fair game. Reading then can be reduced to a necessary evil, soon to be unnecessary for some, as modern technology has developed ways to bypass reading for the sake of content in whatever medium. Without the proper justification for reading, there’s very little hope for anyone developing the skill to the minimum necessary to override the demands of an academic system. “Pwede na” is poison to the skill. For the reading culture to improve, the love for it has to be rekindled. As a colleague of mine would point out, are our readings loveable? Are the proponents of reading lovely?
But let’s go back to why many students are alliterate. Let me thus reflect on behaviors in the classroom: reading all the supplementary material except the reading; jumping straight to interpretation; relying on a study guide’s interpretation, instead of one’s own; or even today, relying on a Large Language Model to formulate an insight for them. I fear that we’ve overemphasized content at the cost of the reading activity and the medium of the literature. I do not mean to say that content is unimportant, but that we have to trust that the combination of proper reading approaches and well-chosen material will let the students discover content on their own. And isn’t there something to love about the act of reading itself? Why do we readers prefer the actual text over a summary? Can we explain why we prefer the actual text? Can we communicate this love to our students?
But this view of reading as functionally beneficial carries with it a heavier implication: that maybe education is also viewed as merely functionally beneficial. Or maybe, deep down, it’s not education itself but the peripheral benefits of getting an education: that of getting a job, earning money and prestige, and whatever money and prestige one can buy. It’s clear in the questions I hear too often: “what career will I have from this course?” “What does this subject have to do with my course?” “Why do I even have to read this?” It’s the obsession over the benefits outside the activities themselves. One has to be practical, of course. And education nowadays is exorbitantly expensive. Students must get their money’s worth. But have we reduced educational value to how useful an individual is to a particular company or corporation or industry?
“To educate a man in mind but not in morals is to educate a menace in society,” Theodore Roosevelt once said. Given the current state of our educational system, I have my own spin to the quote: to educate a student in profession but not in citizenship is to educate a mercenary and opportunist.
Sadly, this is what we are inadvertently prioritizing. Liberal Arts Education was originally understood as the education of the free man. Liberal Arts used to be presented in contrast to the Servile Arts, or the arts of the profession. With the incessant attack on Liberal Arts Education over the years in favor of the Servile Arts of the Major courses–for education with profession in mind is primarily servile education–is a display how our state of freedom is taken for granted. Freedom will remain, for now, but how many know how that freedom is to be used? And we wonder why there’s so much nonsense going around. There’s so much freedom that many don’t know how to use; in the end, that freedom gets squandered, and the yearning for more “freedoms,” even illicit ones, emerges. Shouldn’t the valuing of the transcendentals be taught continuously so it becomes a habit, a virtue? No single semester will magically cement virtues, especially civic ones.
The Plague of Modern Technologies
Before we even discuss Generative AI, the foundations of the plague stretch far earlier than the past few years: search engines, social media, smartphones, and wi-fi. Search Engines have made access to and dissemination of information much more convenient; social media has made public discourse much more possible and at great scales. Smartphones, over the years, have become more powerful than computers from two decades ago, and can now act virtually like pocket-sized laptops. Add the ease of wi-fi, information has become accessible almost anytime, almost anywhere. But how well-adjusted are we in terms of navigating through these technologies? How prepared were the youth over the past thirty years? How have educators, parents, guardians guided students with these advancements in technology?
Before I proceed, I should be clear that I am not condemning these advancements. I have also benefited from search engines and social media in many ways and have seen others turn their lives for the better thanks to this technology. What I’d like to call our attention to is in relation to the assertions regarding the reading attitudes discussed earlier.
Growing up, I still encountered the time when the information on the internet was still looked at with some skepticism. The internet opened the opportunity for anyone to be seen and heard without going through the traditional gatekeepers: the publishers and producers. Anyone who could set up a website could post practically whatever content they wished. This was, in retrospect, a double edged sword. On one hand, information did indeed become easier to upload, receive and disseminate; on the other hand, because of this ease, quality is no longer guaranteed. Discernment over information has become a bigger demand and the stakes have increased. But is discernment still being taught? Is the fortitude behind valuing truth being nurtured? Having to discern has its inconveniences, both from the teacher’s perspective and the student’s.
I mention this because I remember catching a professor once, using only the first five websites that popped up in the search engine. My indignation was great, as we were told to go through assigned readings. The discovery changed my strategy as a student: I stopped reading what the professor assigned and stuck to reading what the professor read. I still scored high at the end of each semester. Did I learn what was supposed to be learned in the syllabus? Probably not. But as a natural reader, I wasn’t worried at the time. What mattered was that I was able to match my professor in the classroom. But being a teacher now, is this the kind of lesson we want our students to learn?
Then we move to the age of social media. From a professional standpoint, social media is something I deeply appreciate. Thanks to social media, networking, finding kindred spirits, fellow scholars, and events that help with the learning became very easy. But along with this comes the peril of dopamine hits: hot takes, memes, rage baits, and other ways to elicit reactions from the digital void. How valid are the hot takes? How accurate are the memes? In recent years, the term “fake news” finally emerged, as if fake news was only a recent phenomenon. What emerged next? The clamor for “fact checkers.” Here we see the greater danger we’ve subjected ourselves to: many are no longer willing to discern for themselves; they’d rather have someone else do the hard work for them. But who fact checks the fact checkers?
What has become more prominent lately is that eloquence and buzzwords are now a standard for what to believe in. Convenience is now the god. And echo chambers are now that god’s temple. Add in the further ease of access facilitated by the smartphone and the wi-fi. The reliance on ease has cultivated the vice of intellectual laziness. Intellectual laziness is fast becoming a culture, if it isn’t already. With generative AI emerging, with its capacity to write and to illustrate among many other things, what else do we sacrifice on the altar of convenience?
Having spent three years studying generative AI, I wonder: how many of its users wonder how the AI works? How many of its users have considered the scopes and limits of its uses? Admittedly, generative AI is an impressive tool. It comes up with better insight than my worst students. It writes better prose than the worst writers I’ve encountered. It has even coached my friends really well when it comes to writing. And it has helped me with drafting memos in the office.
At the same time, I can identify when AI is used poorly. Many times, I see it in the classroom, when students try to use AI to answer my quizzes. How do I know? How am I sure that AI is involved? I deem it best not to reveal all my secrets here. But I think it would suffice to say that the undiscerning user will not have a good judgment on whether the AI’s output is even sound. Generative AI does make processes go faster, but without the prior knowledge or discernment, the user can easily subject themselves to whatever output Generative AI dishes out. As another colleague would more harshly put: the undiscerning user willingly enslave themselves to the dictates of the Generative AI. This has been reported multiple times with AI Generated “sacred art,” but getting details like the rosary or the iconography all wrong and the user not even noticing it. And, sadly, this AI Generated output is disseminated until a discerning viewer notices and calls out what’s wrong.
The Elephants in the Classroom
But how have we dealt with these challenges so far? Funnily enough, many of us have relied on AI Detectors, most likely not understanding how the detector works either. Ironically, we’ve surrendered our discernment to the AI because we suspect our students to have surrendered their discernment to the AI. Unsurprisingly, a closer look at AI Detector technology, they aren’t as accurate as we hope them to be either. We come up with policies on how to deal with the use of AI, but we still aren’t facing the different elephants in the classroom.
As a community, we have not addressed the problematic culture of reducing formal education as a means of getting a job. Yes, getting a job is important, but more important is being a good citizen. A good citizen will strive to be a good worker but a good worker will not necessarily strive to be a good citizen. Sadly, the value of schools, colleges, and universities are more about the professional clout they can give the students, instead of the education they provide. Many academic institutions will justifiably deny this, but the behavior of students and parents will demonstrate otherwise. Why do some parents dissuade students from the latter’s preferred courses? Why is cheating, plagiarism, and Generative AI usage so rampant? Why do students obsess over high grades and try to negotiate their way into getting into lists and Latin Honors? And government intervention in academic matters tends to highlight employability more than anything else. Employability is important, yes; but in a theme I’ve repeated here so often: a good citizen will work on becoming employable, but an employable worker will not likely do the same.
Missing out on the reality that learning itself is vital to a person’s growth is the tragedy. The reality that the fringe benefits of learning can be achieved through other means is the catastrophe. How many of us teachers suspect themselves of having been deceived–even just for a second–by AI generated output? If we have ever doubted or even admitted to being deceived, it does say something about generative AI: this technology can already do tasks people can do. It is to no surprise then that all the technologies mentioned earlier are signs of a new industrial revolution… and I am not the only one, much less the first, to say this. Whether we like it or not, Generative AI will find its place in the work environment, in the economy, much to the dismay of people. We may protest against the technology, we may condemn it, but I don’t think we’ll stop this from happening.
At the very least, we should consider our own shortcomings over the past seventy plus decades: we’ve largely reduced education to something purely functional and pragmatic. We’ve prioritized skill over virtue, convenience over outlook. A part of me laments that somehow, at some time, we’ve lost our way in education. There was a time when education was esteemed as a privilege of the free person but now we’ve reduced it to a tool for servility. Yes, we must learn to serve others and to serve them well, but not as mercenaries but as citizens. We, as a civilization, we’ve largely forgotten this.
We have allowed alliteracy to fester for seventy plus, going only as far as addressing its symptoms but not the heart of the malady. Quite frankly, factoring in our sense of history, how many parents, grandparents, and even colleagues, have reduced reading to its mere functional purpose, emphasizing primarily its fringe benefits over the real value of the activity? Now that technology has caught up to our abilities, we are alarmed. Much of what we’ve taken for granted about ourselves and our value has been rendered obsolete. We’ve rendered ourselves obsolete in many areas because of some misguided negligence.
Is There Still Hope?
I believe that it’s a steep climb back up, but yes, there’s hope. While technical skill and physical prowess is something that technology is able to develop more and more, there is still one last area in humanity that education we can still work on: virtue, particularly discernment and love.
Virtue is probably the one thing that nobody can exercise for an individual. Nobody can be patient for you, be steadfast for you, be brave for you, or love for you. It’s the doer of the virtue who benefits more than the recipient of a virtue. The recipient of a virtue can remain oblivious or ungrateful even, but the one who exercises the virtue is likely to get better at the exercise of it.
Given how technology has positioned itself to take over many skill-based areas in the workplace, in the economy, in society as a whole, our best hope is educating future generations to become good citizens. A good worker is skilled, regardless of virtue; a good citizen is virtuous… who willingly works on their own initiative in becoming skilled.
I believe that the gateway to reintroducing virtue is in the rediscovery of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty: Truth, because reality happens whether we acknowledge it or not; Goodness, because this is where we get our vision of the ideal and the drive and means to strive for that ideal; and Beauty, because it is the shorthand for both Goodness and Truth. While I believe that interpretation still remains important, it must not take precedence over appreciation. Interpretation for the sake thereof is mere sophistry, and it’s appreciation that allows us access to both Goodness and Beauty. And if Goodness is appreciated, the value of Truth also becomes much clearer. There definitely floats the question: how do we even do this? How do we reverse seventy-ish years of going off-track?
Ultimately, we need to work towards a generation ready to work through the inconveniences of discernment, of dealing with the costs of research and creativity. More than ever, the Liberal Arts is ever more crucial, the Humanities is ever more crucial, for the combined disciplines of History, Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts allow us to see the role of technology today and our role in relation to this technology and, more importantly our role in our society and in ourselves. With these ideals, we hope to realize that staying alliterate, while convenient, is not what we are destined to settle for. We can dream to be more, and we can choose to bleed to be more. If we still believe that there are truly good citizens left and if we believe that we are one of them… or if we even just hope to be one of them, our efforts will not be limited to the people we meet, but we will instead sacrifice to build good educational foundations for the generations we will no longer be around for.
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