How to make Philippine education a springboard to a better future for today’s youth
Like many other countries in the world, the Philippines has been suffering a learning problem way before the coronavirus outbreak. A 2018 study reveals that a sample number of 15-year-old Filipino students ranked last in reading comprehension out of 79 countries.
Other issues in our education sector include, but are not limited to, overcrowded classrooms, shoddy public school infrastructure, and low wages for teachers that result in a shortage of educators.
On top of these, Covid-19 further threw education off course, creating more complications, from a drop in enrollment rate with around four million students quitting school based on data from the Department of Education (DepEd) to the forced closure of so many public and private schools.
Despite every effort by the national government and private organizations to improve the education system in the Philippines, little to no progress can be seen.
For instance, there’s Republic Act no. 10931 or the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, which institutionalizes free tuition and exemption from other fees at state colleges and universities, as well as local universities and colleges in the Philippines. There is also the Alternative Learning System, a parallel learning setup for people who cannot access formal education.
Over 130 private companies, meanwhile, support DepEd and participate in nationbuilding via the education of Filipinos.
Brands and businesses, unaffiliated with the government agency, also play their part in augmenting the system of education through their own means and social endeavors.
An example is the tech company Acer, in partnership with sportswear manufacturer Adidas, which has launched its back-to-school deals that help better equip students for the reopening of classes by way of promotions and making gadgets and other crucial learning tools like laptops and desktops more affordable.
Without education and liberty, which are the soil and the sun of man, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired.
—Dr. Jose Rizal
“We are helping students and their parents welcome the new school year with awesome deals in our back-to-school promo. These devices are perfect productivity tools aimed to bring back every student’s excitement for the upcoming school year,” says Acer Philippines general manager Sue On-Lim. “The past two years have been tough on students and their families, and this is our way of giving back.”
“In terms of education, we have a good portfolio for different needs. We are also open to providing support for governments for online education,” explains Andrew Hou, president of Acer’s Pan Asia Pacific operations.
Yet, with all the aid and initiatives in the education segment, how and why is the current system, in the bigger picture, still flawed?
We are aware of the various difficulties, with the apparent ones being financial challenges, a great digital divide, and more important, the unwillingness of students to learn. Remote learning unveiled the lack of resources, particularly digital devices and poor connectivity, showing the disparity between those who can afford education from those who can’t, which has become especially damaging for vulnerable children, already faced with poverty and inequality. Education in the country has always been a privilege, not a right, only made more evident today. And this fact, one can assume, demotivates the youth from learning.
Rizal’s philosophy on education revolves around the provision of proper motivation to bolster the great social forces that make education a success, to create in the youth an innate desire to cultivate his or her intelligence.
In the recently concluded cultural program organized by the Czech and French embassy called “The Unbearable Lightness of European History: Czech-French Writer Milan Kundera on the Trauma of Foreign Invasion,” among the topics discussed by its moderator AA Patawaran and panelists, Sarge Lacuesta, Nicolas Tenzer, and Adéla Gjuričová, was education. Of the main observations in education is the blurring of lines between virtual and reality, which leads one to reflect on the importance of physical learning.
Most schools in the Philippines have been shut since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, and we are one of the few remaining countries that have yet to resume full-time in-person classes.
With the coming school year, however, educational institutions are encouraged to physically reopen in August, marking a new dawn for students to gradually return onsite and be with their classmates, friends, and teachers in person after more than two years. Issues confronting the education sector have of late been hogging headlines including President Ferdinand Marcos’ support of the clamor to review the curriculum to address jobs mismatch.
Still, the ongoing health emergency has its long-term negative effects like disinformation and misinformation and the unreliability of even what appears to be official sources as well as other social concerns.
In the words of author Lacuesta, “knowing that the appendix has burst is a good beginning. It’s a crisis of no education. We must go back to the beginning to know how to know things.”
Every nation strives to build and keep a standard vision for its learning system. Especially in times of crises and abrupt changes, access to education should be given more value.