What's wrong with us? Why are we

We have, it seems, a president lost or confused or astray in his job of governing the Philippines. And this at a time when we need a leader who can light up a candle and roll back the darkness. And so, we have all gone to the saloon where we suspect he drinks Johnny Walker Blue to pummel him pillar to post, beat him black and blue. There is offhand nothing wrong with this. Joseph Ejercito Estrada is after all our president, head of government, chief of state and commander-in-chief. And he has to answer for his mistakes, and the sorry state of the nation which he admits himself is "in crisis."

But these past so many days, in conversation with some close friends, we managed to get past Erap Estrada to delve deeper and longer into what was wrong with our country. How come the East Asian countries worst hit by the 1997 financial crisis have now fully recovered while the Philippines has not? The exception of course is Indonesia currently embroiled in unprecedented ethnic violence that threatens to tear up that huge and sprawling archipelago.

Look at South Korea. Beaten to a pulp in 1997, its currency -- the won -- almost shredded to the winds, shrinking 10 percent in Gross Domestic Product (GNP) in 1998, South Korea bids fair to post a 10 percent economic growth in 1999. Malaysia, badly wounded by street riots and demonstrations when the youth and opposition rallied round Anwar Ibrahim, worsened by a contraction of 7.5 percent GDP in 1998. And yet in 1999, Malaysia is projected to grow by about 6-7 percent. Thailand too, where the financial crisis started in April 1997, had a minus 8 percent Gross Domestic product decline in 1998, but vaulted back with a plus 8 percent in 1999.

We were the least hurt by the crisis. And yet we are the last to recover. And falteringly, at that. We can only post a 3-4 percent GDP growth. We continue to limp while our neighbors have thrown away their crutches and crashed into the New Millennium like a pack of bloodhounds whooping it up because the catch ahead is even more plentiful.

So what's wrong? Okay, I agree, there are quite a number of things wrong with the leadership of President Estrada. But having said that, we haven't done our homework well and thoroughly about what's wrong with the Philippines. James Fallows of the Atlantic magazine reaped kudos and invective alike when he wrote years ago the Philippines had a "damaged culture" where a majority poor co-existed with a minority rich. Instead of revolting, Fallows said, the poor simply accepted their fate. They resorted to beggary, panhandling, scrounging for smelly but still saleable stuff in Smoky Mountain instead of laying siege on the rich in their luxury, walled and sentinelled subdivisions.

James Fallows said he cried when he saw all this, particularly after accidentally digging his feet into a pile of manure in Smoky Mountain.

Fallows has a point there but the roots go deeper. I think -- and let me say this very cautiously -- that while our population has multiplied geometrically, our patriotic bedrock has not followed in stride. When the strains of the national anthem, Bayang Magiliw, are struck particularly in movie houses, our youth and even our elders just move about indifferently, chatter, smoke, engage in verbal trivia. This is not so in many other countries. I have seen Japanese, French, Americans, Germans shed tears in public when their national anthems are played.

Again, we ask the question -- why?

The most acceptable and certainly the most intelligent answer is the lack or dissipation of value formation. Or moral values, if you please. The three institutions that generate, store, conserve and enrich values appear to have abdicated their role in nation-building. And these are the family, the Church and the school. Once I overheard an angry mother berate the high school principal of a prominent college: "I enrolled my son in your school," she said, "because I expected you to instill values in him. Instead, you summon me to complain about his conduct. You are not doing your job right!"

The principal, unnerved, fixed the mother a calm stare and said: "Ma'm, it is your primary responsibility as parents to raise your children in the right way. If you cannot give them quality time because you are busy elsewhere, do not expect the school alone to straighten up your son. We do all we can to educate them, but if the parents are hardly at home, have no time for their kids, there is very little that we in school can do."

The principal was right. I have no comparative statistics. But the Philippines must have the highest ratio of broken homes or broken families in the world. Parents split, separate, and if they do not, they scream and squabble and scorch each other with intemperate even scandalous language in the presence of their children. Or the father is into his club, his golf, his barkada, his queridas, while the mother plays mahjong till early morn, or gets wild into ballroom dancing, shopping at the malls, plying the gossip circuit. Or gets into "liaison dangereuse" herself.

Poverty, yes poverty, that's one of the ultimate evils.

Poor Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, seek jobs and employment abroad. Either the husband or the wife is left at home with the children and the result is moral pandemonium. The absence, the separation leads to infidelity, the resort to other parent dalliances that often become permanent, the birth of other children. The family is split almost mortally, then split again, and the victims are the children, often left to themselves and a social jungle that is wild, wild, wild.

The Church has to deal with this situation, and it hasn't had much success. Its Preferential Option for the Poor rode superb rhetoric but poverty is worse off today. And yet the Church, together with the media, performs a crucial social role in crossing swords with Malacañang on the major issues of the day -- runaway graft and corruption, weak and ineffective leadership, cronyism, no direction for the future. Since EDSA in 1986, the Church has become a force in Philippine politics, all the more so because there is no organized political opposition in the Philippines today. Despite his ill health, Jaime Cardinal Sin remains at the political barricades.

So what else is there to say?

Plenty. Our educational system, once our pride, and symbol of national progress, walks the hobo jungle. And this is what I am ashamed of most as a Filipino. In 1996, there occurred the Third International Mathematics and Science Test among 13-year olds. The Philippines hit the cellar, ranking second from the bottom in math and third from the bottom in science. Globalization? That's a laugh. In the 21th century, we are into a Knowledge World, the 20th century described by the experts as an Information World. What knowledge can we boast of?

Superficially, according to the Business World's In Focus, our 96.4 percent literacy rate exceeds that of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Our combined enrollment for school-age population and collegiate levels is 83 percent, outscoring such rich countries as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore Chile, Switzerland and Italy. Hip-hip hooray! But whoa, what went wrong? Our basic education remained primitive compared with the others.

The Philippine Human Development Report 2000 states we produce "poor academic and social achievements" and thus we knock with futility at globalization's door. Listen to this: "Our basic education encourages an individualist and elitist attitude that is insensitive to the conditions of mass education." Let's pack our wallop into that. What we do produce in our educational system is mass mediocrity, the proliferation of diploma mills addicted to establishing more state colleges and universities. What results is "a mockery of the standards and this makes failure an impossibility by definition."

The Human Development Network reports that 36 percent is adopted as a passing mark in National Elementary Achievement Test, rather than the conventional 50 percent and not to mention the pasang awa grade, 75 percent. What is the Philippine government's antidote to all this? Appropriate more money for education. Education is now the second largest component of the national budget. Wrong again. "Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong which topped the math test, spent amounts per pupil that were only less than half those spent by Japan and other developed countries. Thailand spent $852 per primary pupil but performed better than Germany, the UK, the US and New Zealand, which spent between $2,241 and $3,510 per pupil."

So where do we go from here? How do we improve our basic education? Why are Filipino cellar-dwellers in math and science? We were the models 40 years ago when Thais, even Singaporeans and Malaysians came over to enroll in our colleges and universities. How have we fallen down the laundry chute so swiftly and humiliatingly? Why do we give such a low priority to science and technology when precisely globalization rewards only those who think better, study better, know better and produce better.

Why oh why are we so way, way behind when we know we can do much, much better?