Education

Yesterday, 28 million students flocked to schools across the archipelago for face-to-face classes, the first time they do so after over two years. From early reports, it appears the day passed without much incident. The chaos has been confined to the messy distribution of educational cash assistance by the DSWD.

Each time school opens, we hold our breath. The odds are always stacked against orderliness. We are chronically short of teachers and classrooms, especially in the urban centers where land is simply not available for building new school spaces. Somehow, our education agencies manage to pull things together and get those millions of students placidly settled in their respective desks.

The last weekend was particularly suspenseful. The pandemic forced suspension of normal classes for two years. Parents have nearly forgotten how it was to actually get the children ready for school. Many school bus services have shut down for good. Physically getting the kids to the schoolyard was going to be a challenge.

In the Metro Manila area, traffic was bad even when schools were suspended. With the schools opening, traffic will be a nightmare.

We are one of the countries opening schools last. For over two years, we confronted the pandemic with hardline policies, sometimes nearly approximating China’s “Zero COVID” strategy. Those in charge of our COVID response preferred to be most conservative, fearing a political backlash should serious outbreaks of infection happen.

Young Filipinos suffered the brunt of this overly cautious pandemic policy. They were shut out of schools and trapped in their homes. The so-called “blended learning” strategy simply did not work. We did not have the digital infrastructure to pull that off in any meaningful way.

The quality of our education was bad even before the pandemic. We suffered from education poverty. Young Filipinos had poor reading comprehension. We ranked at the bottom for mathematics and science. In a word, we have been in danger of losing at least a generation to inferior educational services. The prognosis was horrible.

If it is any consolation, the numbers suggest that our population growth rate has peaked. In the coming years, there should be fewer students to service.

The other side of that demographic coin, however, is that we have the most students to service today. It happens at a time when our educational system is at its weakest. Things will get worse before they become better.

When population growth slows in the coming years, many of our problems will be solved. The teacher-student ratio will improve. The shortage of classrooms will be a thing of the past. We can invest more in better educational materials in place of the atrociously substandard textbooks now fed our students.

But we have today to deal with. The teacher-student ratio in most public schools hovers at around 50. Because we lack classrooms, school hours are reordered to accommodate the students, with morning sessions beginning at dawn and afternoon sessions ending long after dusk.

To compound things, several hundred private schools went bankrupt during the past two years. Economic pressure pushed parents to move their children from private to public schools. Our system of public education is under greatest pressure.

Many of our young students go to classes hungry. Malnutrition and stunting are problems that appear to have worsened the past few years. But we cannot afford to use the school system to deliver better nutrition for our young. It is challenge enough to pay our teachers enough.

Our educational policies are not the most adept. For years, we believed the so-called experts who said the best way to educate our young is to use the “mother tongue” as medium instruction. In many areas, it is difficult to accurately determine which language the student actually speaks at home.

We do not have the materials to successfully deliver instruction in some “mother tongue.” What we call the “national language” is not an intellectualized medium. There is nothing worth reading in “Filipino.” It is a patois that is reshaped daily not by the schools but by the popular media.

Those who advocated “Filipinization” of our education missed out on one thing: English proficiency is a national resource. It is the currency with which we interact with the global mainstream. It is the language that made our graduates more competitive. It is the competence that made us the cosmopolitan culture that we are.

I suspect the whole “Filipinization” effort is the major factor that drives down reading comprehension, scientific competence and mathematical skills among our students. It has also made our young more parochial. English is the language of the internet, for better or for worse. We become aware of the world through this language.

“Filipinization” killed the goose that laid the golden egg of opportunities for our young. It narrowed our employment horizons and prevented us from growing in those areas where we excel, such as cultural production.

I suspect this whole “Filipinization” campaign is driven by authors who want monopoly over the domestic market. It is yet another form of protectionism, the general attitude that led to our downfall in cultural as well as agricultural production.

President Bongbong Marcos understands the magnitude of the crisis gripping our educational system. This is why he asked his Vice President to lead the education department.

The diagnosis of what is wrong with our education is widely available – as much as the measures of our failings. We need really strong political will to shake up this dying system.