OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT
The photos of those who trooped to the Manila Hotel and other Comelec offices to file their certificates of candidacy (COCs) gave us the impression that they have all figured out what they seriously intend to do in the next few years once they get elected.
We wish them the best of luck knowing that the current state of affairs in the Philippines is more than challenging. It is daunting.
For those running for national posts, they have to deliver about 10 percent economic growth for the next few years in order to reverse the deep 9.5 percent contraction in GDP during the pandemic. It is not enough to muddle through the next few years with the Philippine government’s maximum target of eight percent.
We need to grow more than our past because, among other serious problems, learning poverty rate in the Philippines is 91 percent! This means that nine out of 10 Filipino children cannot read and understand a simple reading material by the age of 10. This is a huge handicap because good reading proficiency is the student’s key access and foundation to learning in other areas like mathematics and science. Without reading skills, one of the SDG goals, ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all, will remain as mere aspiration for years to come.
As the World Bank reported last year, this learning deficit is due to our teachers’ lack of mastery of their subject matter and absenteeism. In its report “Fixing the Foundation: Teachers and Basic Education in East Asia and Pacific,” the Philippines’ teaching method was considered one of the most ineffective in Southeast Asia. Our classroom culture is far from conducive to learning. Our students are not challenged enough, they are not engaged enough. As a result, they learn very little and their socio-emotional skills as successful learners would remain undeveloped.
Teacher training did not fare as well; they have failed to improve our teachers’ grasp of course content. In the same World Bank report, two-thirds of Filipino teachers had “medium-low” use of effective teaching practices, some 19 percent had “low” use and only 15 percent had “medium-high” use of effective teaching practices. No one was observed having a “high” use of effective pedagogy.
If incompetent teachers impart knowledge incompetently, this would “translate into poorer learning outcomes.” It should be no surprise that indeed in the last Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa) testing in 2022, the Philippines out of 81 countries ranked sixth from the last in mathematics with an average score of 355. In science, it ranked third from last with an average score of 356 and sixth from last in reading with an average score of 347.
With severe setback during the pandemic, student learning was also held back by low teachers’ salaries, poor working conditions and weak career progression. These issues could explain another challenge, and this is the high absenteeism of around 40 percent among teachers not only in the Philippines but also in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam.
The World Bank’s recommendation on fostering systemic improvements and supporting all teachers is most appropriate but this will require money from the Treasury. Unless this fundamental problem of human capital is arrested promptly, we should be bothered by the quality of our political leaders at all levels and those who would be joining the workforce as lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and yes, voters in the next 10 to 20 years.
Of course, we are only talking here about what teachers are expected to impart to their students in terms of information and a set of predetermined skills sets in mathematics, literature, science and even programming and languages. What is implicit in this exercise is that the body of knowledge to be dispensed is what the students would need in 10-20 years.
But as Yuval Noah Harari in his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century argued, we need more than what he called production-line theory of education involving a school, with classrooms of cohorts, and teachers paid by the government or their private employer to teach. “One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body.”
Since nobody for sure knows what the next 10 or 20 years will bring, change and discontinuity will indeed be the salient feature of modern life. And transitions almost always cause stress. Thus, as Harari quoted, some experts would rather suggest that we teach beyond the 3 Rs (reading, wRiting and aRithmetic), the 4Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. These courses could provide our young students with life skills to deal with “change, learn new things, and preserve … mental balance in unfamiliar situations.”
By 2050, the world could be so different from where we stand today. The need to adapt is essential, and we need definitely to invent new ideas and products, we need to reinvent ourselves constantly. Harari could not be closer to the truth when he wrote that “as the pace of change increases, not just the economy but the very meaning of ‘being human’ is likely to mutate.”
It must therefore be clear to those who filed their COCs for the May 2025 elections that one major constraint to a more transformative growth of the Philippine economy is therefore human capital. Our educational system is a big failure and we need more than money to turn it around. We need thinking heads. The odds are just too great because beyond education, our health system is weak, just weak. We only have a ratio of 99 hospital beds for every 100,000 of our population, something that is a just a third of what they have in other developing countries. Out of over 42,000 barangays, 44 percent do not have health stations.
These and more legacy problems of the last 70 years await the legion who committed to render public service together with their families and associates. It’s up to us voters to disprove what John Maynard Keynes once quipped: “Before the 18th century, mankind entertained no false hopes.”