Enter Reality

On Philippine Education

June 6th, 2006 at 7:14 pm (Philippine politics)

Same old problems
First posted 00:15am (Mla time) June 06, 2006
By Inquirer (www.inq7.net)
THAT the Philippine educational system is in a bad shape has been known for the past two or three decades, but nothing really radical has been done to correct the situation. Remedies have at best been palliatives or stop-gap measures.

One recent example of a palliative is the creative arithmetic applied by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who, by decreeing the adoption of a double-shift schedule and a students to classroom ratio of 100 to 1, “miraculously” solved a very real shortage of 74,000 classrooms.

The classroom shortage is only a part of the whole picture of an educational system that is deteriorating, if not actually in a state of utter disrepair. Every year, the complaints are the same: a shortage of classrooms, desks and textbooks and a lack of trained teachers. What is worse is that some of the textbooks have been found to contain many errors.

Because of the shortage of classrooms, some familiar scenes are expected to be repeated at the opening of classes this year: classes being held under the trees and in corridors and some, probably, even out in the streets. Many students will have to bear the stifling heat in overcrowded classrooms that are made to accommodate 45 or more children.

During the rainy season, in some schools that have leaking roofs, raindrops will be falling on the heads of students. A teacher once complained that she had to use a part of her meager salary to buy a sealant to plug the big holes in the roof of her classroom. We wonder how many rooms are like this?

The physical setting, of course, is secondary in importance to the content of education. But is it the ideal setting for students to be packed into small rooms like sardines, or be made to rush through several subjects in four-hour sessions, so that the next batch can be accommodated for the afternoon session? And how can we expect students to learn a lot if five or six of them have to share one textbook?

The teachers are the key people in the educational system. But how can we expect the teachers to teach well if they themselves are ill-trained? There are many stories of teachers who are semi-literate or who teach their students the wrong things, or who are just one chapter ahead of their students in digesting the books they use in teaching. The best teachers are leaving for jobs abroad, and the mediocre ones are left to teach the nation’s youth in the public schools. How can we expect our children to do well in school if they have poorly educated teachers?

Education is supposed to get the biggest share of the national budget, but it is not: Debt service gets the biggest outlay. (In the current national budget, the outlay for debt service is P301.7 billion, or almost three times the P102-billion appropriation for the Department of Education.) It is education that will lift the nation from the morass of poverty and ignorance, but the government is not appropriating enough money for it.

In a stroke of serendipity, however, the recent incident where the President publicly rebuked acting Education Secretary Fe Hidalgo for not remembering her “creative” solution to the problem of classroom shortage has yielded a good result. Members of the bicameral conference committee on the proposed 2006 national budget agreed to increase the Department of Education’s P108-billion outlay by about P4 billion.

Any increase is welcome, but still it looks like a drop in the bucket when viewed against the vast desert of problems in which the educational system is slowly dying. The Department of Education has to be given a bigger outlay every year. New funds have to be allocated to build more classrooms and provide textbooks for the millions of students who report for enrollment in June. A bigger outlay has to be allocated for teachers, to raise their salaries as well as to give them further education and training in their subjects.

The government has to put an end to the era of palliatives. A commission composed of representatives of the executive and legislative branches, the academe and the private sector should perhaps reexamine the educational system and propose reforms, not just in the infrastructure of the system but, more importantly, in the content of the teaching.

MY RESPONSE:

Quality Education remains the rariest element to be found in our society today. There has been numerous searchings for a Goldmine of solutions that could fund and fit  the needs for better education. Unfortunately, the Pirates of the  Phillippines never seem to realized that the only ship towards richer and productive nation is through a cruise of revolutionary reform. A revolutionary reform that encompasses the achievement of needs for all the sectors of the society and unites our divided citizen. We must create our maps and plan and replan, and implement tried and tested measures to resolve constant cankers in Philippine schools. Bringing more golds and resources to the education department must be settled first, (it is in our Constitution to prioritize the budget for this sector!) Sounds easy but lets admit that it really requires money to create infrastructures, learning tools, and trained and efficient teachers. We could say that its a quick fix solution or short lived but we know that it could immediately  impact the way students learn nowadays. If there could be more rooms, there would be a better chance a teacher would focus on  students that are fewer than to handle a hundred or so? Right? If there could be more books then students could study well? Then after giving the needed budget for this sectors, teachers and administrators along with the parents could organize a team that should discuss and evaluate the needs of their community and their children. We should not copy nor mirror the system being implemented in other country because each nation has its own unique ways of learning and cultural and educational diversity. We should retrace our roots and rebuild from those roots. We should understand how Filipino students learn and what types of learnings should be taught. A Grade Six Pupil from Tondo may feel indifferent in his own country if you’ll try to teach him how to play ice hockey and cook fetuccini right? A Fourth year high school may feel like a stranger if you will tell him that its happier to be in Finland than in the Philippines? What am i telling here is that our Pirates should take off their eye parchment and figure out the blindspots in our Philippine Setting. We must not let the captain sink together with his ship, we are all passengers of the ship and are responsible in our journey to improve each others life. Bon voyage!

P.S.

We are against TOFI!

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