EDITORIAL - While we were sleeping

The proliferation of specialized language schools in Cebu and the rest of the country, prompted by the influx of young foreign nationals, mostly Koreans, wanting to learn English as a second language in crash courses offered by these schools, has invited official attention.

First to open their eyes were Bureau of Immigration officials who, quite belatedly, realized that the young foreign nationals they have allowed to enter the country as tourists are staying on as students.

Nothing is wrong with that, except that these young foreign nationals need to have prior student permits first. Needless to say, when it was learned that most, if not all, of them have no such permits, the bureau was filled with a lot of red faces.

A lot of people have been caught sleeping by this phenomenon. In fact, it was not just the officials of the immigration bureau who were caught flat-footed, so were the officials of the country's educational system.

Of course the phenomenon rubs both parties a different way. But they all boil to the same thing, and that is that government was caught unprepared. Clearly there was nothing on the boards that could have prepared the bureaucracy for such a phenomenon.

In more developed countries, bureaucracies are well prepared for eventualities that may not happen in the next decade or the next. Such forward planning is the result of meticulous studies of the different social patterns that are already occurring.

This preparation is not unlike immunization, the body primed to react to certain diseases that may not strike until much later in life. But when they do strike, the body is already prepared to react and defend itself in a certain way.

What is happening in Cebu and the rest of the country is like a body that has not been immunized. It is now shuddering from the symptoms of a different kind of attack whose effects are as yet unknown.

Nobody really knows how this phenomenon will play out in relation to our own lives. But one thing is clear. Some people have taken advantage of certain laxities in the bureaucracy. And when that happens, it is not eventually good.