Education woes: We do not solve our problems!

The banner news of The FREEMAN yesterday was one that I may have seen repeated time and again in the last 24 years as a journalist. The headline screamed, “New School Year, same problems!” I don’t know how many columns I may have written about this subject year in and year out. This is one issue which is our most visible proof that the Philippines just cannot solve whatever ails our country!

Sure, the new Aquino Administration will take the reins of power within 14 days. We already know that the President-elect has already come up with a list of all the problems plaguing our country, so we urge him to try solving this seemingly unsolvable problem because previous administrations dating back to his mother’s time as President up to the time of Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA). While PGMA paraded all her achievements in the nine years she was in office, she was a total hit when it came to Tourism Development or infrastructure development. But alas, she cannot claim to have solved the problems we’ve always having with Education.

I dare not say that this problem is easy to solve. However, there should have been some kind of focus coming from Congress to find solutions to this problem. We all know this is largely dependent on more funds that should be made available to the Education Department, even if everyone knows that Education already has the biggest slice in our expenditure pie.

The key to solving this problem is to put more money where it is needed the most. But rather than prepare more funds for Education, many members of Congress have focused on other issues, like supporting the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill in the hope that it would reduce our population growth. They believe that if we reduce our population, then we would have no need for new schools, classrooms or new teachers!

Yes, we can expect the RH Bill to resurrect in the Aquino Administration, because there’s just too much money that lobbyists are giving to our legislators. Few people realize that when it comes to RH bill, the lobbyists are using foreign monies to get the House of Representatives to endorse the RH Bill. This is what we call international interference of our domestic policies on our population.

So this really is a very ticklish issue. But I would rather solve this problem by focusing on our current population growth, by simply forecasting how many students would be going to school in the next school year, which would also give us an idea of how many school rooms that schools would require in order to fit in all these students. It’s really that simple, which is why we just can’t understand why the Philippine government cannot find solutions to this problem.

We all know that the quickest shortcut to poverty is through educating our people. We also know that the campaign slogan of the Liberal Party (LP) under Noynoy Aquino is the eradication of poverty. So can safely assume that President-elect Noynoy will take the bull by the horns and find ways to solve this problem. So we can only bid him good luck!

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With so much attention given by the media to the bus accident at the Transcentral Highway in Bo. Cansomoroy, Balamban so many people have made suggestions, some good, others ridiculous. But the bottom line is that, the Transcentral Highway is not the type of road for public transportation, because we know too well that the maintenance schedules of majority of these transport groups are seriously flawed.

A case in point are the taxicabs in Baguio City. When I was there last April, I took a taxi. I asked the driver a very vital question: How long do their brakes last, because the streets in Baguio are steep going up or down. The driver told me that he changes brake pads every three months. In short, brand new brake pads for taxicabs would last only three months; perhaps in a private car, brake pads might last a year. So for that ill-fated JD bus, perhaps investigators ought to check its brake pads, whether they are already worn out, which could have caused the accident that cause the untimely deaths of 20 Iranians, including the driver.

Certain sections of the Transcentral Highway should put earthen barriers, not just ordinary metal barriers because these really can’t stop a runaway vehicle from its tracks. In many western countries, they even have a “run-off” area for trucks and buses which is made of loose sand and gravel, wherein the driver of a runaway vehicle merely steers his problematic vehicle into that zone and the truck or bus tires would sink in sand and gravel. So the question is, will DPWH do this?

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