A gap in the literature market

I'm not really sure which lecture this falls under, but a thought just came to me while writing the previous post, and while studying for my Philippine Literature class. I remember one discussion we had in that class where my professor said that the Philippines doesn't have a reading culture, and because we don't have a reading culture, hardly anyone reads outside of the classroom. Despite the fact that I was pretty well-read as a kid, that's a problem I'm fully aware of, because it affected me too.

Because honestly, what's there locally for a tween/teen Filipino to read?

I know we'll be teaching early grades in this class, but honestly I think that teaching reading is a long-term process, it doesn't end in school, it doesn't end in grade 1 or 2. I'm sure many share my sentiments. If we teach these kids how to read, whether in English or Filipino, if we develop in them a love for reading, what happens when they run out of things to read? What if they can't relate to what they read?

Some of the lectures stressed the fact that we have to expose these kids to relatable concepts, whether they be universal ones like courtesy and respect or local contexts like poverty or Filipino courtesy. And yes, there is a very wide selection of Filipino-written children's books, even bigger than when I was growing up. You have Adarna, Lampara, and all these smaller publishing houses making books for young children, books these young children can relate more to as opposed to foreign books.

But what happens when they outgrow those books? Sure, there are many, many Filipino short stories and novels, but majority of them are for older readers, high school or college. Like I said in my last post, when I was in elementary I read a lot of books, but majority of them were American. The contexts of those books were completely different, and although their ideas were universal, a lot of the kids who read them aren't at that deep a level of comprehension yet. It wasn't a problem for me, because I had not only references at my disposal, but experiences from my parents, who both studied abroad for several years.

But what about the kids who don't have that? How are they supposed to understand say, "Little House on the Prairie", when it's set not only in a completely different time and a completely different place? They can't always depend on their teachers to tell them what that book means, because I personally think that one aim of teaching reading is to make children able to read for themselves.

Children from affluent families have the means to buy all these fancy foreign novels for young adults, some have a context to understand them, but what about everyone else? One of the reasons why I read foreign books growing up was exactly because there were no Filipino-written books for early teens. We need more literature for that gap between children and adults -- there are anthologies, there are several novels, but they're not widespread enough.