A country of immense and largely unseen failures

The Jesuit educator, Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, describes government’s neglect of elementary education as “our immense and largely invisible failure.” The fact is that education is not the only basic chore we’ve forgotten to look after. We are a country of immense and largely invisible failures: Our nation is like the proverbial frog inside the kettle on the stove—swimming blithely in water that is coming to a boil.

Our quiet crises

In recent years, our history had been made up of one quiet crisis after another. In basic education, as the Philippine Human Development Report (2008 to 2009) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) tells it: “Out of 100 children who enter Grade 1, only 86 move on to Grade 2; 76 to Grade 4; 67 to Grade 6; and only 65 complete their (six-year) elementary education.

“Of these 65, only 58 go on to high school, of whom 42 graduate four years later. Hence the completion rate for basic education is less than 50 percent.”

Meanwhile, pupils’ achievement levels are “alarmingly” and “pathetically” low. Only 15.3 percent of elementary schools crossed the 75 percent level—the required minimum competency for the next level of schooling—in the 2006 National Achievement Test.

For high schools, less than 1 percent made it past the 75 percent level in SY 2005-2006, while only 13 percent crossed the 60 percent level. The mean percentage score was a very low 45.8 percent. At the Justice Cecilia Munoz-Palma High School in Metro Manila, classes have 100 students.

The root cause of all these is our measly education budget. It makes up only 2.19 percent of public spending—well short of the 6 percent that educators regard as optimal. The Philippines spends $138 for every public-school student every year. Thailand spends $853 (more than six times) and Singapore, $1,800 (13 times more).

We are the only Asian country with a 10-year basic education system, and one of only three such countries in the world. Most have 12 years. Yet the correlation between the lack of education and poverty is so strong.

The poorest households are those whose heads have no formal education at all and those who had no more than an elementary education. “The educational attainment of the household head is the single most important contributor to the observed variation in household welfare,” says The Economist.

Growing hunger

The economist Mahar Mangahas keeps track of another quiet crisis: growing hunger. His pioneering Social Weather Stations finds that the number of Filipinos who report themselves as suffering episodes of hunger has multiplied four times in the last six years, from 5 percent in 2003 to 20 percent in June 2009.

The Makati City business consultant Peter Wallace says that employment is the best reply to poverty. But job creation, hampered as it is by the decline in basic education and the dearth of direct investment, simply can’t keep up with the growth of population.

We have more than doubled in number over the 30 years between 1970 and the year 2000, from 36 million to 76 million, and most projections suggest population will at least double again before it stabilizes.

From these crises, people might seek respite from the government, but public dissatisfaction with corruption in office was minus 21 percent last month. And this has had an impact on people’s satisfaction with the way democracy works in our country.

In 2005 to 2006, satisfaction was down to 38 percent, more than enough to set a would-be man-on-horseback licking his chops. Comparative figures are 59 percent in Indonesia, 66 percent in Malaysia; 79 percent in Thailand and 83 percent in Singapore.

What are we to do?

Much of the sense of hopelessness we feel comes from our inability to break through the concentrations of power that special interests have been able to accumulate in every aspect of national life.

“Philippine policymaking,” the World Bank noted wryly in 1993, “has historically been captive to powerful vested interests that have shaped economic policy, to protect and enhance their privileged position, often to the detriment of national well-being.”

The taming of special-interest groups has been a problem of governments since the American founding father, James Madison, inveighed against the “mischief of factions” in the 1780s. The only way we can protect the broad public interest against the innumerable narrow claims of special interests is to channel their demands and control their effects.

To manage interest groups, we must strengthen our political institutions—our electoral system, our political parties, the civil service and the checks and balances that protect the independence and integrity of the separate branches of government.

Nobody’s minding the store

Our basic problem is that there is no sustained thought going into the national future. Because we have no true political parties and because we share no belief in an agreed-on approach to the issues of governance, there is no continuity in our public policies. Barely eight months till we elect a new administration, we have not heard a serious program of government enunciated by any of our “presidentiables.”

Our only short-term hope is that we luck out on another reformist president, such as Gen. Fidel Ramos turned out to be, over much of 1992 to 1998. And this seems the popular hope that is buoying up the unexpected candidacy of Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd. –Juan T. Gatbonton, Manila Times