Gen C

That’s Generation COVID for you – children whose early development was seriously disrupted by the pandemic.

As described by basic education advocates, the pandemic lockdowns caused Gen C to miss two critical years that form the foundations of learning.

The advocates say the youngest learners are lacking “soft skills” – empathy, and the ability to interact and communicate with people outside their COVID household bubble.

Among older kids, meanwhile, the pandemic lockdowns aggravated learning poverty, placed by the World Bank at a high 90.9 percent in the Philippines as of June 2022.

Pre-COVID, we were already fretting about international test results showing Filipino 10-year-olds ranking last in reading comprehension and second to the last in mathematics and science.

Adding two more years to basic education, making the Philippine system at par with others in the region, and making kindergarten mandatory were among the measures meant to address the learning crisis.

At the same time, the experiment with using the mother tongue as the medium of instruction in the first years of learning was rolled out. The problem was that in a country with over 100 dialects (we can’t even agree on the exact number), it was difficult to identify the dominant “mother tongue” particularly in cities that are melting pots of migrants from rural areas. And by high school, English is the main medium of instruction.

Jose Andoni Santos, policy and advocacy manager of the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), says that for many children, the “mother tongue” used in school was like a foreign language.

This can be catastrophic for early learning and overall comprehension.

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Santos told “The Chiefs” last week on Cignal TV’s One News that a school in Baguio City picked Ilocano as the mother tongue medium of instruction, for both oral lectures and printed learning materials.

The Ilocano, however, turned out to be the version used in the lowlands, which is different from the dialect in Baguio. The country’s summer capital is also a melting pot, with students speaking a Babel of dialects. The learning materials went to waste, Santos said.

You wonder how students coped with the language problem when the pandemic shut down schools, forcing a shift to remote learning for two years.

Those who have been playing with gadgets since they were toddlers could ease seamlessly into remote learning. But the less privileged – and there are millions of them – whose parents had to beg, steal, borrow or depend on donations for the needed gadgets, not only had to familiarize themselves ASAP with the use of computers and cell phones, but also with the two main languages in Philippine cyberspace: English and Filipino.

I understand that there are translations available for some of the country’s major dialects, but I’m not sure about their accuracy. These digital translation services are notoriously inaccurate and unreliable.

No wonder over a million students simply opted to stop schooling during the lockdowns.

Even before the pandemic, I’ve asked adults who dropped out of grade school why they never resumed formal education. They had a common story: they found their lessons simply incomprehensible.

Recognizing the learning challenges during the lockdowns, there were schools that opted for mass promotion of students. No grades were given so how could they fail anyone?

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Benjo Basas, national chairman of the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition, told The Chiefs that some school principals or supervisors also thought it would reflect badly on them and the school if they have failing students. The performance of a school affects allocations for funding and other resources.

He said his group had initially supported the mother tongue program, believing it to be a “progressive” idea, but many teachers retreated when they realized the problems in the implementation.

Basas suggests a pause in the mother tongue program, except in large areas with a dominant dialect. Or else he says teachers can be given flexibility in choosing the medium of instruction.

It’s depressing to ponder how many students who passed and moved up to the next grade during the lockdowns actually learned nothing.

Looking on the bright side, at least they were forced to quickly become IT-literate with the mandatory shift to the use of digital technology for distance learning.

Basas, however, laments that to ease the shift to remote learning, several subjects were taken out of the regular public school curriculum, among them humanities, civics and the arts – subjects that help develop soft skills.

Even before the pandemic, there were already calls for a review of the K-12 program. Simply deciding where to start, however, was complicated. Does the problem lie in the concept or implementation? No one is sure.

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Basas notes that there was no monitoring and periodic review of K-12 since its launch in 2012, and no full assessment. And after over 12 years, he says there are some teachers who still haven’t received their K-12 materials.

Today there is a serious effort to review the program, amid a palpable skills-jobs mismatch. Studies also show that K-12 graduates are not getting the jobs promised when the program was launched. The additional two years are supposed to make them employable upon graduation – not as engineers or lawyers, of course, but as people with skills needed by various industries.

PBEd is networking with certain industries and providing “skills sessions” for jobs-skills matching.

Santos says better mentoring or counseling can help students identify the skills tracks that they want to pursue if they want to be employed immediately after K-12.

Industries can also identify the skills they need to help guide K-12 students in choosing their higher education courses.

Santos believes that if these job opportunities become known, students will realize that there are enough employment openings with decent pay in their own country, and they don’t have to go overseas.

Some may see this as an overly optimistic assessment. How can Philippines companies match the rates offered by their counterparts in advanced economies?

But if you factor in the cost of living in wealthy economies along with the social costs of labor migration, surely there are pluses in working in one’s own country.

Basas stressed the need to focus on learning tracks for employment in the main economic activities in a particular area, especially agriculture, which he laments has suffered serious neglect.

“Do we just want to supply to the global labor market?” Basas asked.

Both he and Santos agree that learning poverty needs an urgent response.

“We really need to address this learning crisis,” Santos said, because it could “become an employment crisis.”