The lucky exception

There was an interesting sidelight to the jeepney strike last week over the jeepney modernization program: Manibela, one of the transport groups behind the strike, was founded by a jeepney driver’s daughter, Reycel Hyacenth Bendaña.

Hya Bendaña is also part of the Move As One Coalition and supports the public utility vehicle (PUV) modernization program; she cites the need to give commuters a safe and comfortable mass transport system and protect the environment. She is even pushing for a redesign of traditional jeepneys to include access to persons with disabilities.

But she also wants the government to address the concerns of PUV operators and drivers, particularly on financing and the provision of skills for running a transport business under a cooperative set-up. So she is glad that President Marcos has promised to slow down on the PUV modernization program.

Having grown up in a household that often had to borrow money to put food on the table, Hya understands the burdens of poverty that many jeepney drivers and small-scale transport operators face.

Last week Hya faced “The Chiefs” on Cignal TV’s One News together with her father Renato, who is a member of Manibela. Hya is clearly proud of her father, who she said taught her that “hard work is high dignity.”

Beyond her advocacy for the welfare of jeepney operators and drivers, Hya is known for her extraordinary academic achievements.

Hya Bendaña first drew national attention before the pandemic, when she obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Management Economics, minor in Development, and graduated as the batch valedictorian of the Ateneo de Manila University’s class of 2019.

Her father started out as a construction worker before becoming a jeepney driver. Hya has narrated working as a jeepney barker for the FTI / Bicutan – Alabang route. Her mother, a saleslady at SM, sewed rags for extra income.

Fortunately, after graduating with honors in both elementary and high school, Hya qualified for full college scholarship at Ateneo.

She is grateful for the opportunities provided by Ateneo (she was also a full scholar at the Ateneo de Naga where she was high school batch salutatorian in 2015).

But Hya asks why quality education in this country remains available mostly in exclusive private schools like Ateneo. Her question has been echoed by many others.

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Universal free public education from kindergarten to college has failed to translate into quality education.

The new president of the University of the Philippines, lawyer Angelo Jimenez, told The Chiefs last month that he wanted access to top-quality UP education “democratized.”

Jimenez, however, acknowledged that this has always been a challenge in the country’s premier university, since quality basic education has long been provided mostly by exclusive private schools with vast resources.

Even in my university days, the parking lot in UP Diliman was always crowded with the cars of wealthy students, some even with waiting chauffeurs. At the start of school hours, there was always traffic buildup within the campus from all those cars. The hallways of UP were noisy with the distinct lilt of the English-speaking affluent crowd. My classmates included the children of senators, other government officials and business moguls.

UP later socialized tuition, basing the (still heavily state-subsidized) rates on a student’s household income. Still, it was not unusual for “university scholars” – top-tier academic achievers with 100 percent free tuition plus monthly allowance (“college scholars” get merely a certificate of recognition) – to come from wealthy families. A decade ago the monthly stipend was around P2,000.

The advantage of the rich starts from early childhood, with proper nutrition and immersion in learning stimuli. Child experts have cited studies showing that undernutrition and malnutrition cause physical and mental stunting.

At age three, children of the wealthy start kiddie or play school. By kindergarten, such children already enjoy a head start on their less privileged peers. In this digital age, they also have the advantage of access to the latest gadgets. The pandemic lockdowns and shift to remote learning highlighted this yawning gap between the haves and have-nots in education.

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In our country, learning is also impaired by the language problem. We have yet to make up our minds on the medium of instruction especially for early childhood learners.

Going by the assessments even of education officials, the mother tongue mode has resulted in a babel of confusion, for both learners and educators, compounding our younger generations’ dismal capabilities in reading comprehension.

We have to be practical about it and pick the language or dialect most widely used nationwide as the medium of instruction. President Marcos can use his immense popularity to overcome regionalism in this aspect of public education. We need a unifying national language; it need not kill the regional dialects.

As for democratizing access to UP, the state university cannot make any dramatic increase in the number of students accepted into the system, due to limited resources and the stringent entrance examination.

What might be possible, according to Jimenez, is to cascade UP education to other schools.

UP educators, for example, can provide upskilling seminars to teachers from other schools. Lectures by respected educators or experts in various fields can be recorded on video and provided to other learning institutions.

Hya Bendaña’s alma mater has initiated something like this. In June 2020 at the height of the COVID lockdowns, the Arete Ateneo Magisterial Lecture Series, consisting of 60 recorded lectures, was uploaded on YouTube.

Such initiatives can enhance the capacities of poor students with potential for academic excellence, such as Hya.

In her valedictory speech in 2019 at the Loyola Schools commencement exercises, Hya narrated her struggle for quality education, and lamented that “a story like mine is the lucky exception, not the rule.”

Within her lifetime, perhaps the situation can still be reversed.