No crisis mode

Pre-COVID, a class size of 50 was typical at a large public high school near my home. A student at the time told us that their teacher was often cranky and spoke rudely to the class, insulting students for supposed laziness and even lousy personal hygiene.

Today, I’ve been told that the class sizes in the school have grown further to 60. I might be cranky, too, if I were tasked to teach so many students in two shifts daily. Simply memorizing the names of 120 students could take an entire semester.

Last year, according to the Department of Education, there was a classroom shortage of over 65,000 nationwide. But a report yesterday from the Second Congressional Commission on Education or EDCOM 2 said the country is in fact currently grappling with a shortage of 165,443 classrooms.

By 2028, according to the EDCOM 2 report, 51,222 classrooms are likely to be condemned for exceeding their life span of 50 years, which obviously will worsen the shortage.

Even with Philippine population growth slowing down, the addition of classrooms still cannot keep pace with the growth rate in the student population.

The EDCOM 2 report paints a grim picture of Philippine education. Our education system is in a serious crisis, inflicting grievous harm on a country’s most precious resource, its people.

Yet until last year, we could see that the crisis seemed nearly invisible both to the executive and legislative branches. The annual national budget reflects the priorities of the government. In 2025, the priority was the systematic looting of billions from public coffers through creative fund appropriations.

Among the reasons for official inaction on the education crisis is that it’s in the interest of the political class to keep the masses undereducated and impoverished, and therefore dependent for life on state hand-outs, with politicians playing a role in the distribution.

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It’s bizarre that in our country, you can’t become a soldier or cop without a certain level of college education. But you only need to be able to read and write, and be of a certain age, to become a senator, congressman, vice president and president of the republic.

The results are obvious in the quality of governance.

Proper values could have made up for any lack of education among those entrusted with governance, such as the Confucian ethics in which several prosperous or rapidly developing societies in Asia are anchored.

As the continuing corruption scandal is showing, however, we’re saddled with government officials – from the highest levels down to the barangay – who lack both competence and proper values, and who think public office is a license to steal from the people.

For example, instead of following the constitutional provision requiring the allotment of the largest slice of the budget pie to education, the looters carried out financial acrobatics to pad the 2025 education budget with items that were never previously included. The looters instead gave the highest allocation to public works while bloating the programs and funding for politicized cash dole-outs.

And the bigger the amount stolen, the greater the chance of getting away with the loot. Pocket P10,000 from public coffers and you can get several years in prison. Steal P10 billion and you can become a congressman or senator, with multiple reelections.

The nation is becoming a cautionary tale on the pitfalls of democracy, in a government of, for and by the people: when we, the people, are physically and mentally stunted, still stupid at age 15, to pick competent and honest officials to run the government, the nation is doomed.

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We’re turning into a full-blown kakistocracy – a state wherein the least qualified are running the government.

Education plays a key role in reversing the slide. But the education system is plagued by more than just a shortage of classrooms. The system also lacks teachers, and in many areas, an environment conducive to learning – lacking the basics such as proper ventilation and safe water as well as the requirements of the times such as computers and WiFi.

The prolonged COVID lockdowns aggravated the situation.

A teacher who retired recently at age 75, who worked in a private high school and later joined the public school system, told me that basic education also suffered from the haphazard rollout of the K-12 program.

No standard curriculum was given to them for the two additional years of high school, she said; teachers were left to improvise. When their performance was assessed, she said, no one knew what the parameters were exactly.

She also said mass promotions of students had in fact been going on for several decades now in the public school system, making it difficult to gauge if learning at the appropriate level is actually happening.

The teacher frowns even on the latest mass promotion of educators. While the move is meant to address complaints of inordinate delay in teachers’ promotions, she said the mass promotion is also allowing the career advancement of the undeserving.

Education is not an assembly line; there is no mass production, the teacher says. Different competencies call for different approaches.

The crisis in education is also driven by the crisis in politics. But there must be politicians out there who can be part of the solution.