Noynoy and education

The ninth point in Noynoy’s ten-point agenda for educational reform concerns textbooks. “I will not tolerate poor textbook quality in our schools,” he says. “Textbooks will be judged by three criteria: quality, better quality, and more quality.”

When I was DepEd Usec in 2001, I changed the way the content of the textbooks was evaluated. I asked my friends in universities to sit down with DepEd’s textbook experts to see if the textbooks then being proposed were good.

Since they were nationally and internationally famous scholars and since they themselves had no vested interest in any basic education textbooks, my friends were objective and strict. As a result, none of the textbooks then proposed passed their scrutiny.

In my stint at DepEd, I did not approve the use of any textbooks, except those that had already been approved by previous administrations. Since I could do only so much in the time I had, I focused on not allowing bad textbooks to enter the system. Had I stayed longer, I would have started looking at the textbooks already in use, to see what should be removed from the system.

There is no question that the textbooks currently used in our public schools leave much to be desired. I am not talking of grammar. I have a standing bet that no one can send me a paragraph written by a Filipino that does not contain a grammatical or structural mistake. (I can say this with confidence because my teacher Fr. Joseph Galdon, S.J., taught me to spot even the tiniest error in sentences written by the great international masters of the English language.)

I am talking about content. For example, our English textbooks still do not realize that adverbs can modify nouns. Our Filipino textbooks still teach Tagalog, rather than Filipino. Our Mathematics textbooks do not use what children can see around them, thus defying the ancient – now mistakenly called constructivist – principle that we learn only from what we already know. Our Science textbooks do not excite children enough to think of pursuing careers in science. Our Social Studies (previously, Makabayan) textbooks do not make our children proud to be Filipino and do not motivate them to stay in our country.

Noynoy cannot fulfill this particular promise even if he had more than six years in the presidency, because all our public school textbooks (I repeat, all) are of poor quality. The process of telling publishers what to put in a textbook (involving a “textbook call” and “learning standards or competencies”) takes more than a year. Evaluating the content of a proposed textbook will take at least a year. The bidding process will take another year. Printing will take another year. Training teachers to use the new textbook will take more than one year. By that time, Noynoy’s term will be almost over. We are not even talking of evaluating textbooks already in use.

There is a solution, however, which I shall write about in another column.

Noynoy’s tenth and final point is managerial. He says, “I will build more schools in areas where there are no public or private schools in a covenant with LGUs so that we can realize genuine education for all.”

I do not know why Noynoy mentions this point. Perhaps he just wanted to have ten points rather than eight or nine. The LGUs, despite the Local Government Code, are really in practice under the control of the President. There is no need for a covenant. Schools can be built as long as there are funds to build them or, as Noynoy’s camp never fails to remind us, if the funds do not go into the pockets of corrupt officials.

Overall, then, what do I think of Noynoy’s education policy?

Clearly, among the presidential candidates, Noynoy has the best proposals for education. Adding two more years to basic education, requiring pre-school, ensuring that a high school diploma is enough for employment, and strengthening math and science teaching are crucial to improving our educational system. His ideas on madaris and textbooks will remain pipe dreams, no matter who becomes his DepEd Secretary. He need not bother himself with “Every child a reader by Grade 1,” GASTPE, or the LGUs, since these are proposals that any DepEd Secretary can implement in his or her first month in office. I do not completely agree with his stand on the medium of instruction, although I realize that, this being an emotional rather than a scholarly issue, he is being merely politically safe by championing Filipino, English, and vernacular languages equally.

Another candidate who has definite ideas about education is Gibo Teodoro. I will take up his views next week.

May I, once again, invite the other candidates to send me their proposed education policies? I will be as objective with them as I have been (I hope) with Noynoy.

LANGUAGE VS. DIALECT: The difference between a language and a dialect is simple: a language has several dialects. There are 175 Philippine languages (some have died) and more than a thousand dialects. Tagalog and Cebuano are languages, not dialects. Tagalog has several dialects, such as Batangas Tagalog, Bulacan Tagalog, Laguna Tagalog, and Parañaque Tagalog. The Cebuano dialects spoken in Bohol, Masbate, Palawan, Samar, and Mindanao all belong to the Cebuano language.