Education in the Philippines during this pandemic has been badly disrupted, akin to a force majeure comparable during the last war on record, which was in December 1941 when the Japanese invaded the country 10 hours after it bombed Pearl Harbor.
For the invaders then, education of the youth was given utmost importance, so much so that by June 1942, schools were quickly reopened for 300,000 students, guided by the new colonial tenets laid out in the Imperial power’s second military order. (The first military order declared the basis for Japan’s reason to boot out America in the country.)
In this pandemic, however, brick-and-mortar school buildings have remained closed to students for more than a year, with learning for many replaced by tutorials aired either through television, radio, and the internet or supervised through weekly or bi-monthly home visits by teachers.
This blended learning template has been the state education officials’ response to the national government’s adamant refusal to open classrooms for face-to-face classes, a fear grounded on the possibility that this deadly pandemic may worsen with further spread of infections.
As the Philippines enters its second year of blended learning under lockdowns next month, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has singled it out, together with four other countries, for holding back millions of students to optimized education.
Dire consequences
UNICEF, however, is not the only concerned international institution that has warned of dire consequences. A World Health Organization report called the continued school closure as “disastrous” for the country’s education system and economy.
The Asian Development Bank had earlier estimated that the Philippines lost 0.61 learning-adjusted year of schooling, equivalent to an 8.11 percent drop from the 2020 baseline. This was, according to the ADB, equivalent to a loss of $26.9 billion to $36.1 billion from the affected students’ lifetime earnings.
A study done by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) states that basic education learners affected by lockdowns may “expect some three percent lower income over their entire lifetimes.” For the economy, this could translate to a lower annual GDP of 1.5 percent for the remainder of the century.
In all these warnings, the worse effect is that students from lower-income households suffer more. Consequently, as the resumption of face-to-face learning is delayed further, the wider the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Not super-spreaders
A concerted effort by our state education and economic teams had been mounted in the early part of the year as a way of paving public acceptance on the need to reopen schools, even on a pilot basis in areas where the risk of reopening was little to none.
The initiative to start the process of reopening schools was supported by a UNICEF review published in December 2020 that schools that reopened during the pandemic did not become super-spreading events, except for a high school in Israel that did not follow mitigation measures.
The UNICEF review also referred to a study by Insights for Education, released in October 2020, that showed “no association between school status and COVID-19 infection rates in the community” based on data culled from 191 countries where schools closed or reopened.
Unfortunately, the news of the more contagious Delta variant came along, and the proposed plan to reopen classes in pilot areas were shelved. This was an expected decision, given that we have an overzealous government whose always go-to solution in this pandemic, with the absence more vaccinated citizens, are lockdowns.
Empowering local school administrators
The national government, it seems, has little trust in its local public school administrators to assess their respective community situations, and henceforth, decide if there is little or no risk to initiating face-to-face learning.
Many of the children enrolled in elementary schools found in far-lung barrios live within the community bubble, and likewise, teaching staff and personnel are mostly locals or who reside within the vicinity of the school.
Mitigation measures that ensure safe in-classroom learning such as socially distanced desks, frequent hand-washing, and face masks can protect both teachers and students inside the rooms, which by the way, are not air-conditioned, and often with windows that can be opened wide.
School administrators carry the burden of regularly checking if there are suspected community infections, and they must be trusted to decide if there is need to suspend face-to-face classes.
If face-to-face learning is selectively allowed, education for rural underprivileged students will be an edge where it is most welcome and needed.
Not too late
It’s not too late for the Department of Education to pave the way for face-to-face learning in elementary schools that are located away from the centers of infections, and where the chance of the virus spreading in the community is more remote.
Lessons during this pandemic have definitely shown that blended learning is not the best way for our students to learn. The pandemic has, likewise, contributed to a high drop out rate, with children whose family incomes have been affected by the pandemic completely disengaging from schooling. Let’s not complicate things further.
In areas where in-person classes can restart, teachers and school personnel must be given vaccination priority to add another level of health safety assurance inside the school.
We must remember that each day our under-privileged school children are kept away from face-to-face learning is another step to further depriving them of the opportunity to improve their lives.
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