EDITORIAL - Good for teachers, not for education

The report that China is accepting 100,000 Filipino English teachers can both be a welcome development as well as a saddening one. It is welcome because it will likely provide better earning opportunities for our Filipino teachers. But it is also saddening because it will likely deplete the number of Filipino teachers who are badly needed at home.

China is just the latest country in need of Filipino teachers. Over the years, these teachers have been leaving the Philippines in search of better chances abroad. In fact, even much earlier, many teachers left not for teaching jobs overseas but for means of employment that fell way beneath their dignities as teachers, and all just to haul themselves out of the desperate pits of poverty.

This increasing demand for teaching jobs overseas can also have another sad and sorry impact on local education. The forced introduction of the K to 12 program despite the unreadiness of the system resulted in a travesty of teaching whose results will now be tested in the first ever batch of senior high school graduates. This means that if the qualified teachers make a beeline for our borders, then a perpetuation of the unreadiness will continue to be the lot of the K to 12 program.

Teaching, despite being one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of all professions, continue to be less attractive in terms of providing real security for those who choose to join it. And that is not perplexing because in the heirarchy of jobs, it remains in the lower rungs of the pay scale. True, there have been recent efforts to improve the economic picture for teachers, but these have naturally been just catch-up efforts after being left behind for so long.

It will therefore not be surprising if, at every real opportunity for improvement, our Filipino teachers will not make a lunge for it, even if it means leaving behind family, home and country. China is just the latest to announce an interest for Filipino teachers. There will be more, as Asia is trying to catch up on English as the future of the next century will be in this continent.

The 100,000 that China needs could just be the tip of the iceberg. As the world's most populous nation of more than 1.3 billion largely non-English-speakers, the Chinese urge to learn English could prove insatiable. Again, it would certainly be good news for our teachers seeking better opportunities. But it can also have very worrying effects on our own educational system, a system saddled by a pretentious K to 12 program that has not lived up to what it was cracked up to be.