Malaysians not reading enough books

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Dato Sri Michael Manyin

KOTA SAMARAHAN: The literacy statistics in 2016 showed that out of 85 per cent of Malaysians who read regularly, 77 per cent of them preferred newspapers, 3 per cent read magazines, 3 per cent read books and 1.6 per cent read comics.

Minister of Education, Science and Technological Research Dato Sri Michael Manyin said that from the statistic it’s obvious that Malaysians are more inclined a to read light material while citizens from developed countries like the US read books.

He said statistics in the US showed that 53 per cent of their citizens read fiction and 43 per cent of them read non-fiction books. From statistical data it is obvious that Malaysians do not read many books compared to the Americans though Malaysia has a high literacy rate in South-East Asia.

“Having said that there is a lot of room for improvement in trying to reach the literacy rate of 99 per cent by 2020 and the quality of material that we read,” he said when officiating at the closing ceremony of the International Conference on Borneo Book Publication 2017 at Unimas yesterday.

“The last survey also reported that Malaysians read increasingly less, as they grew older. By the age of 50, for example, only 20 per cent of Malaysians still read books, a drop from 40 per cent. This is really pathetic,” he added.

Manyin called for parents to inculcate the reading habit and increase the number of books their children read.

“Parents are the best people in nurturing the reading habit among children. Reading increases knowledge, builds maturity and character, sharpens thinking and widens awareness of social, economic, political, and environmental issues,” he opined.

He said that reading is a learned skill; our brains are not hard-wired to read.