Most latin americans complete secondary school without knowing to read well

In Latin America, a young person requires more than a decade of formal studies to complete secondary education. In many countries in the region it is an important step that young people and their parents celebrate as a great family achievement. However, the thousands of days getting up early, the sleeplessness of parents and children, the innumerable expenses and sacrifices do not seem to be giving the expected result.

According to a report just published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, more than half of young people in Latin America and the Caribbean do not reach the levels of proficiency required in reading ability by the time they complete secondary education . In total, there are 19 million adolescents in this situation.

According to the study, 36% of children and adolescents in the region do not have adequate reading levels. The balance is slightly better when only children of primary education age are taken into account: 26% are not sufficient. The results are not more favorable when they are evaluated in mathematics. 52% of children and youth in Latin America and the Caribbean do not reach basic skills. The situation is worse in secondary (62%) than in primary (46%).

Students with reading comprehension problems

- 14%: North America and Europe

- 31%: East and Southeast Asia

- 36%: Latin America and the Caribbean

- 57%: West Asia and North Africa

- 88%: Sub-Saharan Africa

These indicators, in which, paradoxically, Latin America and the Caribbean appear as one of the best-positioned regions of the world, reveal great challenges for the future.

New illiteracy

Silvia Montoya, director of the Unesco Institute of Statistics, considers that the problems that young people have in reading comprehension pose a "dramatic" situation. "That there are children who do not have the basic skills when it comes to reading very simple paragraphs and extracting information from them, I would consider it a new definition of illiteracy. In today's world, having a minimum level of literacy is no longer being able to read your name and being able to write some fact of everyday life, "said Montoya in a conversation with BBC Mundo.

"Lacking reading comprehension is a kind of disability or incapacity to be able to insert oneself into society, to be able to vote and understand the candidates' proposals, to be able to understand one's own rights and duties as a citizen. It seems to me that it affects all dimensions" added. The expert considers reading as the basic skill, the foundation on which the other skills continue to be built.

"Reading to learn is essential because from there you can go from being self-taught to inserting yourself in the system. Without that competence, I think we are generating many children and adolescents who are entitled to many personal frustrations and social and work integration. reading or understanding texts is very difficult to progress in any area, "he said.

Montoya stressed that in today's world there is overexposure to information presented in different ways and that it has different degrees of quality and reliability, so people must be able to extract the information and judge it for themselves. "Being able to read a job advertisement and understand what skills are required is, for example, something basic for any adolescent who is starting working life or who wants to continue training," he said.

A school that doesn't work

But where is the fault? There was a time when it was thought that the problem with education in Latin America was that it was not inclusive, that it left many children out. 

According to Montoya, this is an issue in which the region has improved dramatically and now they even have comparative advantages in that regard in relation to other regions of the world. "Now the reality is that children are in the educational system but there is an inability of the school to provide them with a level of learning that is reasonable and minimal for the circumstances that the world demands of today and tomorrow," he said.

Why it is not possible to give the students adequate training is due, as he explained, to a combination of factors. Among these, he mentions the lack of training of teachers to deal with children with certain characteristics, infrastructure problems, loss of school days due to stoppages or other causes, as well as elements related to the students' own socioeconomic situation, "which may come of households with lower incomes or having less family support. There is a combination of factors that may vary in each place, but obviously there is a lack of specific policies to deal with this problem, "said Montoya.

He added that it is necessary to look at the educational curricula, the training of teachers to ensure that they are able to work with children who come from complicated social contexts, have an adequate environment and infrastructure, as well as adequate social policies. "There is no way to solve it if there is not a comprehensive vision of the educational system," he said.

In this effort, he warned that the application of educational quality assessment tests is also necessary, which are not applied in half the countries of the world. "If we do not have a serious, credible learning evaluation system, not much can be done either because the only way parents have to complain is to have information," he warned.