Time has become a privilege one carves out from these days of want and fear: time to muse, to make sense of what’s going on, to read. Reading is crucial: an act of will, of resistance. Slogging through the tremendous crowd on the last day of the Manila Book Fair last September, one gaped at...
In 2019, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and the World Bank introduced the notion of a “learning poverty rate,” or the share of children who cannot read or comprehend a simple text at the age of 10. Figures that emerged before the coronavirus pandemic indicated that the average learning poverty rate...
