Education, equity

It’s becoming clear that high in the new Aquino administration’s priorities will be the addition of two more years to our formal basic educational system. Right now, we have six years of primary school and four for the secondary to make 10. The idea is to make that 12, but it is still unclear where the two years will be added.

The main rationale being given for a 12-year system is that this is now the global standard, and we have to keep up with it, especially because so many Filipinos want to work overseas.

That’s fair enough, but I hope it doesn’t become the only reason. If a 12-year system is to benefit the country, then we have to be more introspective and look for reasons from within, for ourselves.

The proposal for a 12-year system has been simmering for years now, with all kinds of proposals to get it going in public schools. There was a proposal to add a 7th year in primary school, but this would have been required only for certain students who did not seem adequately prepared for high school. The Department of Education went as far as giving examinations to screen students, but backed out at the last minute about implementing that 7th year.

In the last three years, the Commission on Higher Education proposed that all college degree programs should have a minimum of five years, instead of four. The talk was quite serious, and at one point there were plans to implement it starting this school year. The additional year was actually more of a 5th year for high school, targeting students who were not quite prepared for college. They would have been bombarded with basic courses in math, sciences and even English.

The government clearly backed out from both proposals partly because of lack of funds and partly because of protests, mainly coming from poor and middle-class parents complaining about the added financial burden.

Social mobility

Education has always been important for Filipinos. All of us are familiar with stories of how families sold a small piece of land, or a carabao, to put a bright child through the last year of college. Education’s importance, at the family level, is mainly one of social mobility. I recently went through the work of sociologist Cynthia Bautista and her colleagues on the Filipino middle class and they have evidence that education did help to create some degree of upward social mobility and the emergence of that middle class.

This function of education goes back to the 19th century, when a rising native middle class began to put a premium on getting the best education for their children. Rizal was a prime example: he was sent to the Ateneo and went on to the University of Santo Tomas.

Under the Americans, education offered even more potentials. It allowed a child from a poorer family to make it into the government bureaucracy and although the pay wasn’t that high, civil service offered tenure and many fringe benefits (cheap housing, for example). Under the Americans, education also meant possible employment, if not permanent residence, in the land of milk and honey.

Those possibilities remained after we regained independence in 1946. In the 1970s, the Marcos administration added another incentive for going through the educational system: possible overseas employment throughout the world and not just in the United States.

But parents do have cost-benefit calculations for education. The poor will aim for at least a high school education for their children and some vocational courses, a short electricians’ course for the boys, caregiver training for the girls, that might land them a job in the big city or, if lucky, abroad. The middle class will go for two-year associate degrees or, better, a complete four-year college degree course.

We forget though that with many Filipino families, even vocational training might be a pipe dream. While the government provides free education for primary and secondary school, the costs of transportation and school supplies can be so high, relative to the poor’s incomes, that children are forced to drop out even before they can finish high school.

What we see then is a serious problem of equity. Upper class children start school as early as the age of one. After three years of pre-school they will go to “big school” for at least two years of kindergarten, seven years of grade school and four years of high school. That’s 16 years, and I put “at least” because you have even more years in the exorbitantly expensive international schools.

The poor, on the other hand, have to wait until the child is 7 to get to the public school’s Grade 1. (There is preschool education in some public schools, but this remains very limited.) Then they get the six years of grade school and four years of high school—if they don’t drop out or get pulled out.

Waiting station

The most recent National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), conducted in 2008, had some revealing statistics on the inequities in education.

The median years of education completed by women in urban areas was 9.7 while in rural areas it was 8.7. In the National Capital Region, the figure was 9.8 years while in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao it was a depressing 5.8 (meaning most women did not even finish grade school).

The NDHS also reports that for the richest 20 percent of its respondents, the median years of education was 13.5, presumably six in primary school, four in high school and 3.5 in college. The poorest 25 percent of respondents, on the other hand, only had 5.7 years.

The Aquino administration will need to study all these figures, with the equity issue as the foremost consideration. While the educational system has helped push social mobility, it has also, through the years, contributed to widening the gaps between the rich and the poor. Even as we debate on a 10 or 12-year system, the children of richer families have access to preschool, 11 or 12 years of basic education, undergraduate degree programs, masteral and doctoral degrees, postdoctoral fellowships.

Using parents’ cost-benefit considerations, the new government will have to determine where additional years might be most useful with the least burden for families. Adding years to college will mean missing out on many young Filipinos who can’t even finish grade school. The five-year college plan was also seen as devious because it passed on costs to parents, given that even state universities and college charge tuition, while public high schools and grade schools don’t.

Then, too, we need to look at getting our house in order first with what we have today. What would happen if we added more years to school, but continue to use textbooks crawling with misinformation? What would happen if we added more years, but don’t have additional teachers, or classrooms? What would happen if we added more years, but continue to teach subjects which parents and children find irrelevant?

Ten or 12 years, the educational system must not become simply another tedious waiting station, where children wait to get a piece of paper, goaded by parents telling them they need to do this so that someday they can get out of the Philippines for good. –Michael Tan, Philippine Daily Inquirer

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Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph