EDITORIAL - Calamities taking toll on K to 12

Philippine education is taking a beating not just from poor quality and inadequate facilities but from the ravages of nature as well. Recent natural calamities that wiped out a good number of classrooms have added to an already short supply.

School children who used to make do with second-rate teachers, erroneous textbooks, and inhospitable learning conditions now have to contend with emotionally and psychologically challenging natural events such as earthquakes, sinkholes and floods.

If all of this is a sign that God is not pleased then He must not be pleased with Philippine education. No other sector in Philippine society seems to have suffered so much in recent memory. And if an answer is to be found for the mystery of God's wrath, one need not have to look far for it.

Philippine education is headed by Bro. Armin Luistro, a man of God. Surely, if God is pleased with Luistro, He would not have strewn his path with so many thorns. Yet God very clearly did. So the thorns must not have been challenges but a form of punishment.

But why the punishment? Because Luistro has not been very forthright in dealing with the people on the matter of his flagship program called K to 12, which adds two years to the 10-year basic education curriculum. No government program had been as loudly and widely reviled as this. But Luistro would hear none of it.

The basic opposition to K to 12 is not that it is bad. In fact it is actually good. But people opposed it because the country is simply not ready for it. Yet Luistro refused to listen to reason and decided to push through with the program solely on the argument that the Philippines will be left out if it didn't.

But what must have really gotten God's goat was when Luistro resorted to using half-truths in pushing the program -- such as when he denied there was a classroom shortage in the country by insisting the shortage is only in the cities but that in the countryside there are even rooms with no students. What an argument.

So, ever working in mysterious ways, God must have decided that if the Filipino people cannot stop Luistro from what is clearly a fool's errand, perhaps He will. And God has indeed spoken loud and clear. So many disruptions in the school calendar have happened that it would be foolhardy now to push on with K to 12.

Despite the best of intentions, better education just cannot be attained by earthquake-shocked children driven to live in tents because their homes have either been destroyed or flooded, and whose classrooms have been wiped out such that classes are held under trees by teachers who themselves lost homes and loved ones.