Our government school reforms can work if….

People often attribute the problems of education to a lack of funds. The augmentation of salaries may have attracted more teachers but much is required for their character transformation. While more children are born, additional school houses entails immense budget. There is no provision for maintenance budget. Library, laboratory and sports facilities are either non-existent or inadequate.

Well-known private schools do not have these problems, so their principals are more free to update their curriculum and re-train their teachers.

The real cause

Attempts to resolve these problems are good in themselves but miss the point. Fundamentally, the problem is social rather than pedagogical. It is the poor relationship between adults and children. Adults do understand the laws that govern the maturation of a child from birth to maturity. Parents and teachers presume that children must simply obey, for they know what is right. Such an attitude has made tyrants of parents and teachers. This will continue, unless adults realize that “The child is in the process of becoming while adults have reached the norm of the species.”

There are barely any teacher-training schools left in the Philippines and in many parts of the world. For instance, the Australian government allows schools to train their own teachers. If teachers’ colleges still exist, their syllabus is still strictly pedagogical, focused more on teaching techniques than on the developing child. The “period of man’s construction” is divided into four phases: early childhood from birth to six, childhood from seven to 12 years, puberty and adolescence from 13 to 18 years, and adulthood from 19 to 24 years.

Using the Montessori system from preschool to high school for five decades has revealed to us the “new children” and “new teachers.” Regardless of social class and racial difference, the preschoolers in our five schools in Greenhills, Sta. Ana, Angeles, Pampanga, Las Piñas and Fairview together with our 156 outreach O.B. Montessori Pagsasarili preschools for the underprivileged all over Luzon, readily discard “deviations” (laziness, disorderliness, unfriendliness, dependence) within the first months to become little working men and women.

The ultimate end of education is employment

it has taken 14 years to “educate” the Filipino who reaches college and much less for those who usually reach high school but fail to graduate since he needs to work. Yet most of these so called “graduates” are barely mature and competent to attract good jobs. Commenting on the escalating rate of unemployment, a Filipino executive in the 70s wisely observed, “There are many jobs available but there are not enough competent employees or workers.”

The ultimate end of education is employment. If Philippine education were alright our economy would surge forward. David Ayerst, British author of “Understanding Schools” states that, “Periods of rapid revolutionary change seem to occur in education every 30 of 40 years. It will probably rate with 1870, when school boards were introduced, and 1876, when education was made compulsory, as well as with 1902, when a national system of secondary education was first established, or with 1944 and 1947, when free secondary education for all was introduced and the minimum school leaving age was ultimately raised to 15.” Ayerst, in his works, also observes that just before you leave the school or the university, the problem of job becomes important. The maximum school leaving age since 1964 has been 18 years although being a federal government it varies from state to state. For instance, Idaho being an agricultural state may shorten the senior technical training since the students needed to work in the farms.

In 1987 then DECS Secretary Quisumbing made DECS collaborate with a task force of nine preschool experts to upgrade and standardized the preschool curriculum, teacher training and organizational criteria on a national scale. I was one of them. Supported by DECS Order No. 29,87, CONCEP (Coordinating Council for Early Childhood Education in the Philippines), it gathered the major preschool administrators from both private and public schools in the Philippines to review the revised preschool requirements regarding the curriculum, teacher training and school building with school superintendents. Three national conventions were held for consulting preschool owners and teachers between 1987 and 1991 coinciding with EDCOM the Senate-Congressional Survey of all schools from kindergarten to tertiary education. The Philippines was one of the first 35 countries then who ratified the Convention for the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Frequent tampering with kindergarten and Grade I

The major work of CONCEP was to try out a more advanced Early Childhood curriculum. A comparison between the early attempts of the DECS preschool program with that of UP RCH combined with the Montessori system was done. There was not enough time to effectively carry out the latter. The DECS proposal for “preschool teacher training” only reiterated the basic four-year Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science course plus 18 units of Education and Child Psychology subjects unlike the CONCEP -guided teacher training program which made use of tried and tested materials in different subjects which the fours and fives preferred instead of mere workbooks.

Obviously, the P100M budget allotted to early Childhood Education by Senator Angara, who headed the 1991 National Survey of Education (EDCOM), is the much-needed blessing to resolve the above problems. I recommended that the budget should set up a separate Center for Early Childhood Education to focus on the concerns of very young children whose unique nature will not respond to traditional teaching. The monthly meeting of CONCEP with the BEE officials for eight years resulted in the publication of the UNESCO-sponsored preschool manual “Planning the Young Child’s Education” not only for school administrators and teachers but for parents as well

Unfortunately, the DECS’ Bureau of Elementary Education has decided to use the money for public elementary schools in three selected regions of the country. Dr. Edith Carpio of BEE, who has been sitting with me in the UNESCO National Commission (Education Committee) to represent DECS, specified that the P100M will convert the first month of Grade I in selected public school into a kindergarten program referred to as “the eight week“ program. This kind of spending is like pouring water into a sieve.

Predicting the ideal launching pad for whole Philippine educaton system

In the 1990 to 1991 EDCOM survey of education in 13 regions of the country by the Senate and Congress, I sat as one of the many consultants. After watching my presentation of the Pagsasarili preschool with a slide projector and sample apparata, a DECS official remarked: “Whew! I can clearly see how dynamic the preschool program can be if it uses the Montessori system. It will surely be the launching pad for the whole educational system of the Philippines. I see the enormous overhauling of each department if preschools will be so advanced, then the elementary schools will have to be jacked up….so will the high schools and our colleges….” The gentleman from DECS was alarmed instead of delighted by such a prospect.

In my perception, DECS has the money but she refuses to accept other well-proven educational philosophies and practices. With difficulty, DECS admits that the $240 million spent on retraining public elementary school teachers (PRODED) failed.

Unique nature of preschoolers does not respond to traditional teaching

 What should school reforms be like in the elementary schools? Grade I teachers in the public schools are the unhappiest teachers. Without any preschool background, the Grade I students can be very stubborn in learning. The DECS should have done away with the Minimum Learning Competency (MLC) goals for Grade I providing only very easy reading, writing and arithmetic lessons to the seven-year-old public school kids who are perceived wrongly to be capable of achieving on a very low level. Now that DepEd is bent on the K to 12, suddenly, the five-year-old children have been accepted into Grade I. This is a serious offense to the enormous reasoning power of the 6 to 12 years old elementary school children. (Note how public grade schoolers lose more their self-esteem since their schools are referred to as “Mababang Paaralan.”)

For the past 25 years three- to five-year-old children in our affordable Pagsasarili preschools all over Luzon have easily learned to read “kartilla” and write monosyllabic words, count to 1000, work with geography and history materials and speak English... acquiring the competencies of a third grader.

The social revolution on behalf of the ‘it cittadino dimenticato’

We are racing against time. The powerhouse of the country is the people. It is ignited in early childhood. Let us be inspired by Dr. Maria Montessori who says that there must be “an active social campaign to make the child understood. For a multitude of weak creatures living amongst the strong, without being understood must be an abyss of unsuspected evil.” She thus describes her work as “an effort to bring about a great social revolution on behalf of the ‘forgotten citizen’ (it cittadino dimenticato) whose rights have never been properly recognized by society.”

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