Noynoy vs Gibo on education

I want to shift the electoral focus from personalities to issues, particularly the issue that affects all of us – education.

I am opening this column to the presidential candidates to expound on their platforms for education. I will edit whatever they send me only for length. I will, however, also offer my comments on their platforms. I will assume that candidates that do not send me concrete educational proposals have no such proposals to begin with and are not interested in any way in education.

It seems to me that, as far as education is concerned, we have a choice between platforms and not just personalities. I am talking specifically about the problem of adding years to our educational cycle.

We have the shortest educational cycle in the world. We are, in effect, the least-educated people on earth. (Needless to say, there are a number of brilliant Filipinos that, despite their lack of education, are able to excel in their respective fields, but the fact that we can name these exceptions means that they represent a negligible percentage of our population.)

Noynoy has adopted the position of the Omnibus Education Reform Bill (Senate Bill 2294) sponsored by Mar Roxas in the Senate. That bill provides, in Section 8, that “The Department of Education shall prescribe a twelve (12) year basic education curriculum for all public and private schoolchildren nationwide, including the number of years to be assigned to the elementary and high school levels, to be implemented on the sixth year of the effectivity of this Act.”

The sixth year is mentioned because all educational reforms start with Grade 1. If we allow a year for Noynoy to get DepEd moving on this reform (it really does not need congressional action, just political will), all incoming grade school students in June 2011 will have seven years of elementary school, which means that the change really occurs when the students reach Grade 6.

This means that, in June 2017, there will be no First Year high school students, every Grade 6 student having gone to Grade 7. Private high schools will encounter great financial difficulty, because one-fourth of their expected income will not materialize.

This means also that, in June 2022, there will be no incoming first-year college students, all Fourth Year high school students having gone to Fifth Year high school. Many private colleges and universities will go bankrupt, because freshman tuition forms a huge chunk of their income. (There is a solution, which I wrote about previously, to the problems brought about by delaying admission to high school or college.)

On the other hand, Gibo has said that he will require all undergraduate degree programs to be at least five years long. (This is different from the current Arroyo plan to add a two-year bridging program between high school and college. The Arroyo policy does not add years to college education nor to basic education. It instead introduces a new stage of education – pre-university. Gibo wants to lengthen university education itself.)

If Gibo gets elected, all parents will have to spend for an extra year of college education for their children. Even if the government paid for the tuition for the extra year (as Gibo could certainly arrange, by simply using the government money that otherwise would go to corruption), parents would still have to shell out more money for transportation and food (not to mention housing for out-of-town students). In these times of great economic hardship, we can bet that many parents will no longer send their children to college. That means fewer highly-educated Filipinos around to help the country.

Both Noynoy and Gibo offer bitter pills for parents, students, and schools to swallow. I am happy, however, that both at least offer concrete solutions to a problem that other candidates ignore. It is better to have a bad solution than not to have a solution at all.

If I have misrepresented the views of either Noynoy or Gibo, may I ask them to please contact me? I will be very glad to issue a retraction and to print their corrections in this column.

By the way, we in CHED’s Technical Panel for General Education are working overtime to find a solution that can be implemented by June 2010 to the problem of our short educational cycle. We have already consulted most professional organizations and concerned government agencies; we are set to consult heads of schools in the next couple of months. Since the solution is a work in progress, I cannot yet write in this column what we think should be done. If the presidential candidates want to contact us, however, we will gladly privately share our findings and proposals.

Dear candidates, who really cares who your parents or friends are? Teachers need to know whether they will still keep their jobs under your administration. Parents need to know when and if their children will graduate from college. We all need to know if our OFWs will soon find themselves unqualified, despite their college degrees, to work abroad, because foreign employers have decided that, whether we agree with them or not, they will not honor degrees from a country that has too short an educational cycle.