Education emergency

Another school day, another minor student killed by a teenage schoolmate.

This time, it was on the fourth floor of the Las Piñas National High School, where a 14-year-old boy stabbed dead a 13-year-old on July 31. The reason for the killing? Police said the victim reportedly failed to hand over P10 change after buying bottled water for the killer.

The killer, who reportedly bought online the knife that he used, has been turned over to a juvenile facility of the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

It’s not the first school killing in Las Piñas. On April 11 last year, two Grade 8 students were stabbed dead by three Grade 9 schoolmates outside the campus along CAA Road in BF International following a minor argument earlier in the day between the two groups.

Was the killer at the national high school inspired by that incident? Or perhaps he was inspired by the mass shooting on June 22 at the San Jose National High School in Tacloban, wherein a 14-year-old, backed by a 15-year-old classmate packing a revolver, sprayed two classrooms with gunfire from a 9mm pistol, killing three schoolmates and wounding 20 others.

Since the Tacloban incident, cases of armed violence and threats of shootings and even bombings have hit several schools across the country.

Education Secretary Sonny Angara describes the growing school violence as an “emergency” from which Philippine education needs rescuing.

Discussing the problem with him, however, I thought that the issue would be stuck in the emergency room for a long time.

Angara, who has a 15-year-old son, seems cool to two of the controversial proposals for dealing with the problem. One is lowering the age of criminal responsibility and showing that stiff punishment awaits even minors for armed violence. The second is strictly restricting minors’ access to social media; Angara is amenable only to limiting the hours spent online.

Instead, he wants a stronger crackdown on nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) groups, whose faceless members lure minors through online gaming platforms and “groom” them to commit real-life acts of mindless lethal violence and self-harm. The 14-year-old in Tacloban was reportedly addicted to the sandbox game GoreBox, which promotes, as the name implies, blood and gore.

NVEs, as cyber cops have pointed out, have no political agenda and simply promote hatred of humanity and the world. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies in high-tech countries have been cracking down on NVEs such as “764,” but success has been limited because of the nature of the threat.

Any crackdown on NVEs in our country will have to be accompanied by a lot of other measures to deal with school violence and bullying.

To promote proper parenting, for example, Angara is considering linking the objective to the 4Ps conditional cash transfer program. But millions of families are not covered by the 4Ps.

Stakeholders stress the need for a whole-of-society approach, with the different moving parts filling in what’s lacking in the others.

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Unfortunately, our country is weak in turning the best intentions into reality. Providing sufficient resources alone can be daunting.

Angara pointed out that promoting mental wellness in schools requires enormous resources, both in funding and manpower.

The public school system under the Department of Education (DepEd) needs over 50,000 guidance counselors and 45,000 counselor associates. Angara told The STAR’s online show “Truth on the Line” last Monday that this will cost from P30 billion to P40 billion.

Under a 2004 law, a registered guidance counselor (RGC) in our country is required to have a master’s degree in Guidance and Counseling and pass a licensure exam. Angara said only a few higher education institutions have this program, and low pay makes the field unattractive.

A school counselor associate needs only a Bachelor’s Degree in fields such as Psychology and Behavioral Science. So DepEd is currently recruiting an initial 10,000 school counselor associates. Good luck finding them.

Even with DepEd getting a budget of over P1 trillion for the first time this year (the entire education sector is allotted P1.345 trillion), Angara said there still aren’t enough funds for sufficient deployment of RGCs.

Naturally, he welcomes the higher DepEd appropriation. That’s 4.4 percent of gross domestic product, marking the first time for the country to meet UNESCO’s recommended allotment for education in the national budget pie, of over four percent of GDP.

This GDP share, however, must be sustained for the next 10 years for improvements to make a dent in the education sector, Angara said.

Perhaps one day he will experience first-hand the travails of educators, in case he tries his hand at teaching. This is one of the options he is considering for 2028, he told me, apart from the possibility of returning to public office, as a senator or local government official.

Before then, he has a patient waiting for urgent treatment and discharge from the emergency room.

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LEFT BEHIND: Just to highlight the importance of education, I’m sharing these viral lines from YouTube, source unknown:

In 1960, the Philippines and South Korea stood at the same starting line. Some measures put us ahead. Manila was one of the most modern cities in Asia. We had the talent, the resources, the head start. South Korea had just survived a devastating war. Poorer than we were. They looked at us as the future.

Then something happened.

They invested in schools. We watched our best minds leave.

They built industries. We built political dynasties.

They planned for decades. We survived, one crisis at a time.

Today the average South Korean produces nine times what the average Filipino does. Their students top the world. Ours still fight for chairs in leaking classrooms.

We weren’t cursed. We weren’t lacking.

We had everything they had, and more.

So the question isn’t what happened to them. It’s what happened to us.

And the hardest part, we still have everything we need.

The only thing missing is leaders who won’t steal the future again.