Our government school reforms can work if…

This February 19, 2015 column, “Our Government School Reforms Can Work If...” recently won the 2015 La Sallian Scholarum award as an ‘outstanding published column on youth and education’ together with two other articles “Teenagers, the Endangered Species” and “How Teachers Oppress Children.” It calls attention to the validity and urgency of its message during the turbulence in the country. It’s the clarion call to the nation that must be made loud and clear, repeated constantly, to engage everyone in an inner transformation that will launch a much-needed social revolution:

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 budget is yearly approved for schoolhouses, yet it lacks 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.

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 not yet 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.” Therefore adults must help the child to become with a suitable environment.

Teacher-training schools are undergoing changes in several parts of the world. For instance, the Australian government allows schools to train their own teachers. If teacher-training colleges still exist, their syllabus is still strictly pedagogical, focused more on teaching techniques than on the natural gifts of the developing child. Its curriculum fails to recognize the “ Periods of Man’s Construction” and its 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, religious or racial differences, 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 surpassing the academic excellence of children from traditional schools.

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 enter the job market because he lacks technical skills. Yet most of these so called “graduates” are barely mature and competent to be well employed. 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 all right 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 or 40 years. In 1870 school boards were introduced and six years after education was made compulsory. By 1902 a national system of secondary education was first established but it was in 1947 when free secondary education for all was introduced.” Ayerst also observed that the maximum school leaving age since 1964 has been 18 after which the problem of employment becomes important.

Ignoring the 1987 upgrade of preschool education

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 revise the old 1965 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) that included the child’s right to quality education.

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 ECE 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 unlike the CONCEP-guided teacher training program which made use of tried and tested hands-on materials for all subjects, more adaptable to the fours and fives, 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), was 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. Unfortunately this has been overlooked in spite of the monthly meeting of CONCEP with the BEE officials for eight years while regularly meeting each new DepEd Secretary. Even the UNESCO-sponsored preschool manual “Planning the Young Child’s Education” put together by DECS Secretary Lourdes Quisumbing and Dr. Nita Guerrero with us for school administrators, teachers and parents was ignored.

Sad to say, the DECS’ Bureau of Elementary Education (BEE) 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. From then on, constant tampering with preschool and grade I agenda went on, so that today the K to 12 program compelled DepEd to pull out of the DSWD Day Care for 3s to 5s the five-year-old preschoolers to the credited DepEd public preschool. Moreover the local dialect is now legally considered the medium of teaching until the third grade disregarding the fact that English can be more spontaneously absorbed in early childhood. I guess the real concern is that the Filipino teachers have lost the competence in speaking English. The same situation exists among students of state colleges whose command of the English language is nil as one frustrated professor observed, “My preschool child’s English is even better than my university students’.”

The ideal launching pad for the 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 the preschool consultant. After watching the video presentation of the Pagsasarili preschool, 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, overhauling preschools, elementary schools and jacking up the high schools and colleges…” Was the DECS gentleman delighted or alarmed?

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

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 ‘Il 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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