A painful review of Philippine education

In a previous column, the nation’s fixation with education was shown to be pragmatically contexted. Many Filipino families make incredible sacrifices to have a son or daughter finish high school and, whenever possible, college. Sadly, however, their principal concern has not been to gain a functional education but to secure a formal certification for completing the necessary years in high school or college – regardless of those years’ substantive educational value.

Not education per se but the paper diploma one receives makes a crucial difference as poor Filipinos try to land whatever job there is in a normally depressed job market. In the private sector as well as in many civil society settings, unscrupulous persons and agencies are quick to spot and work the huge market for milled diplomas. They waste little time in putting up substandard high schools and colleges all over the country. With poorly trained, grossly underpaid teachers and ill-equipped school facilities, these private "educational" institutions – no more than thinly-veiled mercenary operations – produce mostly dysfunctional graduates, young people who are unable to think or express themselves in any natural or synthetic language, often illiterate as well as innumerate and pitifully inadequate when confronted by analytical chores.

Very few private schools can survive this critical observation. Unfortunately, these institutions are normally beyond the reach of the poor. Their high tuition and other school fees, moderated at times by well-meaning subsidies for the economically disadvantaged, actually intimidate even those from the middle class. Other than winning the lottery or coming across some surprising legacy, the only way the less than wealthy may avail of this better education is by investing in pre-need educational plans. (Here, the hazard is in choosing a good company. The market teems with opportunistic groups selling educational plans and later heinously leaving their trusting clients with nothing but broken dreams. This columnist is fortunate in his choice of the Philippine Educational Trust and Pension Plans, a company that apparently takes its commitments seriously. Given the double whammy of the 1997 regional financial crisis and the much more recent government move to deregulate school tuition and other fees – both grossly undermining actuarial projections for current educational costs and in many cases doubling them – this company has chosen to honor its contractual obligations instead of looking for legal loopholes and fudging its now immensely costly responsibilities.)

The incompetence and fecklessness of most private schools has been matched by government institutions tasked with servicing the educational needs of young Filipinos. Despite dramatic constitutional and other legal provisions proclaiming the education of Filipinos as an urgent governance concern, the quality of education nationwide has continuously deteriorated. This is a fact amply documented by various studies of Philippine education, from the 1971 Presidential Commission to Study Philippine Education to the series of Senate education and other commitee reports in the 1980s and 1990s as well as other more recent studies done by the Department of Education, the UNESCO and other interested parties. In the last three weeks, Philippine media feasted on the Department of Education’s statistic that only half of one percent of 1.4 million elementary school graduates taking a high school readiness test passed at the 75 percent level. (Struck by feelings of compassion as well as sheer pragmatism — DepEd could not accommodate more than 700,000 students in a remedial one-year course to prepare them for high school – the passing mark was promptly lowered to 35 percent and only 700,000 failed to make the grade. This questionable exercise of pragmatically-indicated compassion is nothing new; in the DepEd, there are so called transmutation tables that allow students to pass when they correctly answer 15 percent of a given competency test.)

In comparative international performance, Filipinos students suffer much relative to Singaporeans, Koreans, Japanese, Thais and other nationalities, most particularly in mathematics and science. In regional rankings of Asian universities and colleges in the late 90s, Philippine institutions of higher learning – those that three to four decades ago basked in the limelight and enjoyed excellent academic reputations – could not rank better than 40 among some 60 competitors where 1 is best and 60 is farthest from being best. Many of the Southeast Asian schools that used to send their faculty and promising students to study in the Philippines have actually gained superior ratings than their Philippine counterparts.

The unmistakable decline in the quality of Philippine education and the nation’s educational institutions did not take place within a single decade. Some of the reasons for this deterioration worked their effects over several decades and might even be traced to some efforts to try reversing a definitely poor condition. When scarce national resources are budgeted to deliberately serve educational objectives – as in the constitutional provision mandating that education must account for the single biggest budgetary outlay in any given year – how can the operational results be other than positive? When the leading public educational institutions commit themselves to intensive faculty development and other programs for institutional development, how can the interests of a public in need of more and better education suffer?

There are many paradoxes in Philippine education. A final column will be devoted to exploring some of the more incredible ones. That way, more Filipinos might get to understand that noble intentions and pious declarations do not suffice in any serious strategy of educational development.

And better educated on this score, this nation might yet do what needs to be done.