Losing competitiveness

It’s been a month since the start of the school year, but in one public high school in a city in Metro Manila, 80 students in one class have been issued just one textbook, for English. For the rest of their subjects the students have only the word of their teachers to rely on, and no one can be sure if the teachers, many of them underqualified, have their facts right.

In private high schools, a student must attend classes for an average total of eight hours daily. For students in these schools, part of the rites of passage to their teens is getting used to day-long classes in high school instead of the half days of learning in grade school.

In some public high schools, classroom shortage is so acute that classes must be held in three shifts daily, for a learning time of just four to five hours. In some schools, students must content themselves with classes every other day, also in three shifts.

A number of students in public high schools are old for their classes, since at some time in their young lives, they have temporarily stopped schooling because of personal or financial problems or to find work.

For a number of these students, the cost of school uniforms alone is a major drain on the family budget. Daily transport fares take away food from the family table.

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Over at certain private schools, parents are worried about a different problem altogether. In these schools students’ average weekly allowances range from P2,000 to P5,000. A senior in one high school received P15,000 a week in the previous school year.

What do such students do with all that money? They try to double the amount, or quadruple it, by placing bets on basketball games. School officials dread the start of the UAAP (Universities Athletic Association of the Philippines) season this weekend, with De la Salle playing against Ateneo. The games also herald gambling season in several exclusive schools.

Last month one of the schools postponed the start of classes by a week to wait for the end of the National Basketball Association season. The NBA and the UAAP are the favorites of young gamblers and the syndicates that operate the school betting networks.

Officials of the Department of Education, school supervisors as well as leaders of the Chinese-Filipino community have sent out an SOS to authorities to put an end to the gambling activities. But this could be as tough as trying to eradicate jueteng in this gambling-crazy country.

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Students place their bets by text messaging. Payment is often made outside schools, or through automated teller machines. In one school where the gambling problem is serious, students have access to ATM machines on campus. Officials in this school asked parents to limit their children to a cash allowance of P500 a day, but the kids have the ATMs.

Some bookies have learned to hire students themselves as bet collectors. The average bet is P5,000, but sometimes transactions can go as high as P100,000. Occasionally an entire class pools funds to place a bet. Money transfers are made on a weekly basis. Last year a student won a whopping P1.2 million on a single bet but lost P2 million later in the week.

Remember that shooting incident involving Ryan Jaworski, a son of former Sen. Robert Jaworski, and 14-year-old Anjelo Elton Yap? Published reports said investigators were looking into school gambling as the source of the trouble, with Jaworski allegedly trying to collect P4,000 from the boy.

The story has receded from the headlines as the two parties are reportedly trying to settle the case amicably. But it would have been interesting if cops had probed deeper into the case.

We still don’t even know who fired 60 shots into the Greenhills parking lot in San Juan. One unconfirmed report said 14 Mandaluyong cops were summoned to assist Yap, whose father Tony is said to be close to local government executives in Mandaluyong. Tony’s sister is reportedly married to the owner of Mega Pacific, the consortium that won the poll automation deal that was scrapped by the Supreme Court. The way events are unfolding, however, we’ll never know the true story.

And we may be no closer to finding out who are behind the gambling syndicates in schools. I don’t know if new Interior Secretary Angelo Reyes can do something about this; he already has enough on his plate with kidnappers and "hulidap" cops. Concerned parents say cops may be involved in the gambling syndicates.

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Parents and school officials are worried about the gambling problem, which could lead to violence especially when big money is involved.

Apart from the violence, education can only suffer when students are distracted and their values distorted by get-rich-quick schemes.

Such is the tragedy of Philippine education: we have millions of impoverished students who don’t have sufficient textbooks or classrooms for learning, and a small group of lucky students so flush with cash they think they need not study too hard or even work for a living.

We are left with only a handful of children — the future of our nation — who know the value of work and learning, and who are lucky enough to have access to quality education.

What happens to a nation whose human resource deteriorates with each new generation? Millions of students in public schools are doomed by poverty. Children of privilege in exclusive private schools should offer some hope for the nation. But how can children concentrate on science and mathematics when they’re focused on the results of the UAAP and the NBA?

We might as well forget Philippine competitiveness in the Information Age. Our best bet is to be a constant source of blue-collar workers so desperate for jobs they are willing to risk being held hostage and kidnapped in Iraq because the pay there is higher than in the rest of the Middle East. Last night 120 workers who were barred from leaving for Iraq refused to leave the NAIA, saying the ban might be lifted.

That’s pathetic — and alarming. There has to be a better, safer way to make a decent living. But we won’t get there unless we do something drastic about the state of Philippine education and raise the quality of our human resource. Authorities look like they are fully aware of the problem, but so far no one has offered a viable solution. Everyone is running around like a headless chicken.