Slovak News Back to the news
Sefcovic: Level of Literacy Among Young Readers Alarmingly Low in EU
Sunday 13 December 2009 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, December 13 (TASR) - Slovak EU Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, who is currently responsible for the sphere of education, culture, training and youth, worries about the inadequate reading-literacy level of children in Slovakia, as well as the whole of Europe, he told TASR on Sunday.
"Every fourth 15-year-old European has a problem to understand what they read, and Slovakia follows this trend as well. I consider the situation in the whole Europe alarming," he stressed, looking for the reasons in the fact that young Europeans spend more time with the computer than reading.
Sefcovic sees the solution in co-operation of various entities - ministries, teachers, headmasters.
The Slovak EU Commissioner, who is slated to be in the future EC responsible for inter-institutional relations and administration while being one of seven EC vice-chairs, noted that not only Europe is tackling the problems of unsatisfactory levels of literacy among young readers. The U.S.A. and Japan, for example, face the same shortcoming. Finland or South Korea, on the other hand, are exceptions. "Family pressure results in children doing more reading and working with written texts," he added.
Not only to point to negative trends, Sefcovic also pointed to pleasing results of a survey carried out by the British University and College Union (UCU), according to which "Slovakia is among the best countries when it comes to a coefficient that assesses how many children complete primary and secondary school".
All rights reserved. Any publishing or further dissemination of press releases and photographs from TASR's resources without TASR's prior written approval constitutes a violation of the Copyrights Act.
