One of the worst in the world

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Education for All 2010 Report, the Philippine education system is one of the worst in the world in terms of primary school enrolment. The sad part is that our primary school enrolment numbers rank alongside countries such as the United Republic of Tanzania or Zambia that have much lower per capita incomes than the Philippines. As it is, a constant refrain concerning our education system is that we are a poor nation and cannot afford to fix all of the issues. And yet, countries much less wealthy than us are able to educate more of their students. The number of children out of school since 1999 has actually increased: between the ages of 6 to 11 there are over 1 million children out of school, an increase of 100,000.

Part of the issue in the Philippines is because of marginalization: the needs of the poor in terms of education are not being met by our government. The inequities faced by the disadvantaged are further reinforced by our inability to provide them with an education. Education is and always will be the ultimate driver behind national development. Education is the means by which social gaps can be closed. Failing to educate people is the surest way to continue to transmit poverty from generation to generation. The Philippines spends 2.3 percent of our gross national product on education: well behind the average of East Asian nations (3.6 percent). This is even behind Turkey (4 percent), Morocco (6 percent) and Tunisia (7 percent). The issues that our education system faces are of our own making.

In the late 19th century there was a prominent Spanish journalist who was based here. He once wrote that the best way to control the Philippines is not to educate the Filipinos, but to teach them skills. Basically, it was geared towards crafting the country into a labor force. In the beginning of the 19th century, people like Luis Rodriguez Varela were asking for a more open and liberal education system; with free schools for the disadvantaged. The need for better education was a constant refrain from Jose Rizal and others. Our revolutionaries of the past truly understood the value of education in nation-building.

Education though is not just teaching skills or dates and places. Education involves teaching our youth how to think, how to ask questions and how to analyze. It is also teaching the students why things happened, not only that they did. A constant complaint is that Philippine elections are more focused on personality than ideas of policies and programs. The majority of our population is poorly educated. How can we expect them to think about and analyze elections based on issues when they have not been educated to do so?

Solving our education problems is not an easy task. The first issue will always be money. But for education, there should always be money. Investing in education is investing in the future of the country. As we pointed out, we spend less in terms of gross national product that our regional neighbors on education. We are also sure that if corruption is ever reduced the funds necessary to improve our education system will be found.

We need to make sure that first we have enough teachers. This can only be accomplished by raising teacher salaries and implementing a faculty development program to ensure there is a supply of properly trained and qualified educators. We also need to make sure that teachers have the correct tools to educate our students. This means eliminating textbooks that are error ridden. As a matter of fact, we consider error-ridden textbooks a travesty. Making sure that our textbooks are accurate is a step in the right direction. We also advocate revamping our curriculum to bring in more liberal arts and critical thinking to the classrooms. Again, teaching dates and places is not education, it is memorization.

Education is nation-building. –Alejandro R. Roces (The Philippine Star)