Two months into the current school year the Gardener’s meandering around various provinces set him ruminating on the state of education in the Filipino nation – while headlines were closely following the Reproductive Health controversies and the untimely demise of the Secretary of Local Government.
LEADING ON AND DRAWING OUT
Schools and De-Schooling
Education’s Tasks and Challenges Today
Last Election’s Promises
There were many occasions during the election campaign that PNoy promised to be an “education President”. At one Coordinating Council of Private Educational Institutions (COCOPEA) Congress on the State of Philippine Education today, PNoy was clear: fixing the state of education would be his long-term solution to problems like poverty and the lack of employment.
PNoy
From: pssst.com.ph
“My education team has designed a way to go from our current 10 years to a K-12 system in five years. Kindergarten to Grade 12 is what the rest of the world gives their children. I will expand the basic education cycle in the country from a short and insufficient 10-year cycle to a globally comparable 12-year cycle before the end of [my] administration,” PNoy said.
He urged university and private school leaders to join him in achieving his 10-point basic education agenda, which includes measures like the expansion of the Governance Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education Program to fund the studies of 1 million poor but deserving high school students in private schools, and the introduction of technical vocational education as an alternative stream in senior high school.
“Those who can afford to pay for up to fourteen years of schooling before entering universities are getting the best jobs. I want at least 12 years for our public school children to give them an even chance at succeeding,” Aquino said.
Meinardus
In this light, one Dr. Ronald Meinardus, a liberal ideologue who used to work in the Philippines, liked to remind his fellow liberals that according to the human capital theory, the economic development of a nation is a function of the quality of its education. In other words: the more and better educated a people, the greater the chances of economic development.
The modern world we live in has been termed a ‘knowledge society’, where education and information have become production factors often more valuable than labor and capital. Thus, in a globalized setting, investment in human capital has become a condition for international competitiveness.
Prescinding from any justified critique of globalization the fact is we can hardly think of another nation that is so much part of a globalized economy than ours, given more than ten per cent of our people working beyond the territorial limits of our native land. The Philippine educational system, poor as it is, may in fact be subsidizing the affluent economies being served by millions of overseas Filipino workers who spend the better part of their productive years in those foreign lands. Does this mean that our education system is therefore quite adequate if not superior to other countries’?
Neglect and Arrested Development
An education consultant of Aquino’s remarked one time that Philippine education actually deteriorated so much that it now occupied a position behind that of countries in Africa.
Luz
A case of “arrested development,” is how former Education Undersecretary Jose Miguel Luz put it. “It’s flat. In this business, flat is not good. Going 1 or 2 percent up is not good. You’ve got to be going up 5, 8, or 10 percent,” according to Luz, associate dean at the Asian Institute of Management’s Center for Development Management and consultant to Aquino. “In this business, if you are not getting better, you are falling farther and farther behind. And that’s the problem. When we compare ourselves to where we were and compare ourselves to our neighbors, we’re not getting better. They’re getting much better than us. They’re improving at a faster rate.”
Till lately, the Philippine government’s spending on education was even less than half the national average for sub-Saharan Africa. It was just over 2 percent of national income, contrasted, for instance, to Indonesia’s almost 4 percent, Malaysia’s 6.2 percent and Thailand’s 4.2 percent. Laos spent more at 3.0 percent.
The current education budget is P238.8 billion, higher than last year’s P207 billion but lower if taken as a ratio of GDP. Last year’s budget was 2.3 percent of GDP, but UNESCO has prescribed 6 percent of a country’s GDP as minimum standard for education spending.
This is not to say that spending more money on education is an automatic route to success. But further depriving an underperforming education system of resources is not a good starting point for strengthening quality, coverage and equity.
Basic Stats
Among Filipinos 10 to 64 years old, 40% went to elementary school, 32% went to high school, 19% reached college or higher levels and 9% had zero schooling.
Because the nation spent only a meager 2.3 percent of gross domestic product on education, the country suffers from a shortage of classrooms and teachers and produces low-quality graduates. Out of 100 students who enroll in primary school, only 65 finish grade six. Of these, only 43 finish high school. 91 percent of Filipino high school students are squeezed into crowded classes of 41 or more, often reducing their ability to learn.
The National Statistical Coordination Board revealed that it did happen in one school year (2006-07) – when only 83 percent of children were enrolled in primary school, down from 90 percent five years earlier. Even worse, only 59 percent of children eligible for secondary school were enrolled. This meant that one out of six children was being deprived of primary education and one out of three children was deprived of secondary education.
The Philippines, then, is still far from achieving the Education for All goals set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization by 2015, because of income inequalities. The poorest 20 percent of the population receive five years less education than children from the wealthiest families. On average, the poorest 20 percent have 6.3 years of education compared to 11 years among the well-to-do families, according to the NSCB report. The past nine years saw the national average tuition rate increase by as much as 89.39 percent, negatively affecting the poorer sectors.
When one time the Department of Education chief said the government had increased its education budget by 13 percent to address the country’s educational woes, it was not revealed that a significant portion of that budget for education went to the educational needs of military and police schools and personnel. That education czar failed to explain that billions of pesos from the education budget go to train members of the armed forces and the Philippine National Police, despite the fact that these two agencies are among the biggest and most well funded government agencies in the annual budget. Has the PNoy government finally taken a good look at this?
PNoy’s Position
Mr. Aquino has suggested increased direct assistance to private schools. “One of the reasons for the decline in school participation is the poor health of pupils. The health program must be supplemented by a feeding program. But where do you get the money? You build 40,000 schools or you enroll about a million students in private schools. If you enroll the same class in a private school instead of building classrooms, chairs or blackboards the price difference is P100, 000 per classroom, which can fund the feeding program.”
Aquino continued: “The facilities are already there and the private schools become your partner in taking care of the overhead…Before I spend money, I’ll make sure that I already have it. We’re targeting to increase the tax-collection effort by 2 percentage points or about P150 billion, depending on the deficit that will be bequeathed to us.
“And then you have P280 billion lost to corruption, which could have been used for policies, programs and projects.” Well, then, has PNoy had a chance yet to do his own investigation of corruption at the Education Department – from the Deped central office in Pasig to the school on a remote island in the fringes of the archipelago, from petty or survival corruption engaged in by lowly clerks who sit on papers until suppliers cough up grease money to top-level corruption where policy-makers at the Pasig or regional offices change, bend or breach the rules to favor suppliers that come up with bribes?
Has he started looking at the areas most vulnerable to corruption: procurement and recruitment – from the accreditation to the payment of suppliers? Money also changes hands from the time a teacher applies for a job to the time (s)he requests for a change in assignment or works for a promotion. In some cases, expensive gifts or cash-less transactions (“in kind”) replace money in the education bureaucracy.
Corruption has become so institutionalized that embezzlement, nepotism, influence peddling, fraud and other types of corruption also flourish. Payoffs have become the lubricant that makes the education bureaucracy run smoothly. The result: an entire generation of Filipino students robbed of their right to a good education.
“Increasing the number of school years is also our position,” Mr. Aquino said. The 10-year program is compounded by the fact that we have ‘shifting.’ What was once eight hours a day of classes is now down to four hours.
“And then the students are hard-pressed. I asked education officials during the budget hearings in the Senate because it was said that science and health concepts were being discussed [together in the same period]. Does that mean they tackle three subjects in one sitting?
“’Do [students] have this book called ‘English for You and Me?’ ” I asked. ‘Yes,’ they replied. ‘Do you do this every year?’ I said. ‘No, every five years,’ they said. ‘How come after five years, you still come up with a book that has 500 errors?’” I asked. They never gave a good answer.
“On teachers’ salaries, we have the Salary Standardization Law-3 which the chief executive has to implement,” the consultant said.
Some Good Reports?
The previous administration had bragged that it did make progress, pointing to increased participation rates of elementary students and improved results in national achievement tests (NAT). The total mean percentage score in the NAT improved, from 54.66 percent in school year 2005 to 2006 to 59.94 percent in 2006-2007, 64.81 percent in 2007-2008, and 65.55 percent in 2008-2009.
For school years 2005-2006 to 2008-2009, Math improved from 53.66 percent to 67.37 percent; English, 54.05 percent to 61.81 percent; Science, 46.77 percent to 58.86 percent; Filipino, 60.68 percent to 71.90 percent; and Hekasi, 58.12 percent to 67.84 percent.
However, the Aquino consultant was skeptical. “There’s a group in UP (University of the Philippines) that had a proposal to evaluate the testing instrument to determine if the test was the same every year in terms of difficulty, complexity, and testing,” according to Luz. “There are those who say, from what they see, that the test is the same every year—we don’t know that for sure but there are speculations. Now, if you don’t change the test every year, as a teacher or as a school, you can start training students how to answer the test. You can just train the kids and it gets better and better.”
Then Luz pointed out that the participation rate—the ratio between the enrolment in the school-age range to the total population of that age range—for elementary had gone down from 87.11 percent in 2004-2005 to 85.12 percent in 2008-2009.
For high school, it went up from 59.97 percent in 2004-2005 to 60.74 percent in 2008-2009. Taking “the half-empty-outlook” this meant that 40 percent of students who should be in high school were not in school.
Drop-out Rates, Completion Rates and Rankings
The dropout rate for elementary slightly improved from 6.98 percent in 2004-2005 to 6.02 percent in 2008-2009. For high school, it also slightly went down from 7.99 percent to 7.45 percent.
The completion rate, or the percentage of first year entrants in a level of education who completed the level in accordance with the required number of years of study, also improved in elementary, from 69.06 percent in 2004-2005 to 73.28 percent in 2008-2009. For high school, it went up slightly from 72.38 percent to 75.24 percent. Nevertheless, these completion rates meant that for every 100 students that entered elementary and high school, about 25 did not finish.
The completion rate of the Philippines was comparable with that of Taiwan and Korea back in the 1950s but this was no longer the case. “Today, Korea and Taiwan have almost universal completion for high school. So, they’ve really bypassed us. We’re not moving. That’s a problem,” the Aquino consultant said.
Education reformers have noticed that the problem of dismal learning achievement in high school begins after Grade 3. “If you can’t read at Grade 3, everything becomes remedial after that,” Luz says. “And the remedial becomes worse and worse because if you spend half your year reviewing the previous year, you will only have half of the year left. The following year, you are already half way behind. So, every year, it gets worse and worse.”
A senior officer at the UNESCO said about the Philippine education situation: “Of central importance is the poor quality of teaching, linked in turn to the inadequate recruitment of sufficiently qualified teachers and to a failure to train, support and motivate teachers. The passing rate for the licensure exam for new teachers has also declined…Achieving greater equity in education will require a joined-up strategy with wider poverty reduction initiatives aimed at supporting livelihoods in remote regions, combating child labor, and addressing the problems faced by indigenous groups.”
Luz says that while it takes about 10 years to see if educational reforms would really take hold and turn around a declining educational system, PNoy should not hesitate – should really give his all because there is no other choice.
“The next president cannot say I won’t be around (after 10 years) so I won’t pay attention to it. You have no choice. You have to pay attention to it. That’s why we need an education president.” Do we have one now?
The Meaning of the Term
In discussing education, almost all people have heard the Latin terms. Etymologically, the word is derived from educare – to “bring up”, which in turn is related to educere – to “bring out”, “bring forth what is within, one’s potential” and, at its root, ducere, “to lead”. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. In the largest sense it is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual.
Thus, in pre-Magellanic times, education as our forebears experienced it, was informal, unstructured, and devoid of methods. Children were provided more vocational training and less academics (3 Rs) by their parents and in the houses of tribal tutors.
Thus, it should not be hard to accept that in the natural order it is parents who must be considered first teachers. They are the first and most important educators of their own children, and they also possess a fundamental competence in this area. In other words, it is correct and natural to say that they are educators because they are parents.
Later they may have to share their educational mission with other individuals or institutions, such as the Church and the State, especially in matters concerning their schooling and the entire gamut of socialization. Admittedly, parents by themselves may not be capable of satisfying every requirement of the whole process of raising children. Thus, Church and State will find it necessary and legitimate to give assistance to parents. This assistance, however, must find its intrinsic and absolute limit in parents’ prevailing right and actual capabilities. All participants in the process of education should only carry out their responsibilities in the name of the parents, with their consent and, to a certain degree, with their authorization. This surely must include what we now refer to as “sex education”.
In these times when muddled thinking is more prevalent than clarity, it must be stated in no uncertain terms that whenever these parental rights are denied, frustrated, belittled, usurped, or interfered with – assuming the parents are themselves being faithful to their commensurate duties which accompany these rights – then those persons or institutions placing themselves as obstacles to the parents also place themselves as obstacles to Nature and her Maker.
If parents were more prepared to be their children’s first teachers, the payoff would be both personal and economic. The research is clear: according to studies of individual families made by the University of Minnesota what a family does to encourage learning is more important to student success than family income or education. This is true whether the parents finished high school or not, or whether the child is in preschool or in the upper grades.
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Santiago
If the traditional family is something of an endangered species, so is Nanay’s role as the primary parent-as-first-teacher. That trend raises an interesting question. Should Nanay be subsidized? Is her role as first-teacher valued enough to actively preserve?
That question may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago filed the “Parents as Partners in Learning Act” precisely to subsidize Nanay in her role as first teacher.
Schools and De-schooling
Down the decades and down the years, schools have taken on a life of their own that has little to do with the needs of society, children, or the adults those children will become. Our schools do not seem able to teach the competence the average citizen needs to become responsible, productive and self-fulfilling. We are graduating people who are learning less and less.
“Schooling” — especially as it is practiced now — is neither synonymous with education nor as important as education and significant learning.
Garlikov
As Mr. Richard Garlikov one time so aptly put it: “The problem is that schooling generally trivializes literature as a certain format on a set of note cards – characters, settings, plot, etc. It trivializes math as a certain set of propositions or as solving certain kinds of problems under time constraint conditions. It trivializes biology as the memorization of a set of names of anatomical parts or chemical molecules that don’t mean anything to students other than that they can say or write them when asked. The important significance and wonder of most subjects is almost always reduced to the trivial listing of a number of facts that have no excitement and that students merely mechanically memorize if they learn them at all.”
Again, Mr. Garlikov: “The best students end their senior years in high school, and often their senior years in college, unable to grow anything, make anything, build anything, or repair anything unless they learned to do those things outside of school. They have little understanding of human nature or its higher potentials. They cannot even imagine, let alone appreciate, the potential non-material richness of life or the capacity of the human spirit. They cannot analyze situations or problems into components from which they can draw insights. They cannot discover, or even see when it is pointed out to them, lessons for their own lives in history, literature, or science. They cannot discover lessons even in their own circumstances because they have not learned to see their circumstances objectively. They cannot compare their circumstances with those of other cultures or times. They cannot make appropriate, useful distinctions. For the most part they cannot think about anything in other than a superficial or mechanical way. At best they can write useless papers or do useless projects in ways no one cares about, on topics that have no excitement or meaning for anyone, including themselves.”
Has the putative education President been showing signs of an innovative and critical spirit yet? It is hoped he will go to the extent even of finding ways to de-school Philippine education.
Illich
Said the original philosopher of this topic, Ivan Illich: “Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.”
Schooling and de-schooling should really become two sides of the same education coin.
When this happens, the Gardener feels, a new Filipino will emerge – creative, critical, can-do, and caring. FINIS.
Charles Avila – The Gardener