The merry-month of December started with sad news. Filipino students ranked lowest in an international assessment for mathematics and science for grade 4 in 58 countries. Countries like Pakistan, Morocco, and South Africa ranked higher. The study noted that only 1% of grade 4 students are able to apply conceptual understanding to solve problems in math.
Another study gave us a double whammy. Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) noted that only 7% of our grade 5 students excelled in math, reading and writing. More than 70% of our students were observed to be performing in the 3 lowest bands.
These findings hardly elicited a public outcry. Save for Senator Win Gatchalian, the assessment results only hugged the headlines for just a day. If such bad news were economic in nature, e.g. a drop in GDP, or a rise in inflation, they would be talked about over TV and radio for days. Forecasts will be made on the resulting drop in employment, a possible crisis in the stock market, and worsening poverty. Analysts and planners will be consulted on what steps the government should take. In contrast, a crisis in education has been sidestepped as a matter for the DepEd to solve.
But the education crisis is as significant as an economic crisis. A labor force with weak thinking skills and inability to solve problems does not augur well for a bright future. The country will forever be haunted by unemployment and poverty. And with poverty comes problems in peace and order. It is also a matter of justice where quality education becomes a privilege only of the rich instead of being a right of all children. The words of Mr. Washington SyCip ring in our ears. “if children are uneducated, they will become poor. If they are poor, they will sell their votes.” The kind of government that we elect is a product of the poor quality of our basic education. Our people are easily duped by demagogues and accept fake news and propaganda as gospel truth.
Certainly, the current system of education does not work. I was so struck by the UNDP and Human Development Network report in 2000 that described our education system as “highly centralized, self-contained and paternalistic with little to learn or benefit from parents or community at large.” The report continues that the “system fails sufficiently to harness the support of local governments, families, communities, and civil society.” Sadly, very little has changed, and the quality of our basic education has deteriorated. While we ended up second from the bottom in an international examination in 1996, our children are now at the bottom.
Something has got to give. We need to recognize that education is not just a matter for the DepEd to manage. We need to provide genuine participation to local governments and their communities in planning, implementing and evaluating education programs. They have to be part of the decision-making process. But this goes both ways—local governments must consider that children who are not voters are their most important constituents.
There is something that we can learn from the appointment of a very successful entrepreneur with very little background on education as Minister of Education in Indonesia. Minister Nadiem Anwar Makarim co-founded Zalora and an app-based transport service Gojek that is now valued at US$10 billion. His approach in reforming education is “think big, think different and think quick.” And he does. His approach is through deregulation, de-bureaucratization and freedom of learning. He freed teaches from administrative work to enable them to focus on developing minimum competencies, creative thinking and character education. Their daily teaching plan has been reduced to only a page. Despite being an IT expert, he says technology can never replace interaction between parents and students, and between students and their parents. He exhorts teachers to drop memorization and instead nurture problem solving and innovation in classrooms.
To have freedom in learning—we should be thinking of what it means. It can be the key to our freedom from mediocrity.