Assembly-line education (Part 1)

The secretary of education, Brother Armin Luistro, has declared a full month to honor our teachers. My two parents were mentored by American educators in what were then called normal schools, which trained teachers in the noble profession of teaching.

In my mind, this is still the noblest profession — molding young minds. There is no task greater. And so in memory of my parents, I offer this piece to Brother Luistro for the two American cents (prewar value) it may be worth.

The nation is currently engaged in a discussion of the DepEd’s plan, called K-12, to extend our primary and secondary educational system by two years to match the world standard of 12 years. The logic is that this will make our high school graduates immediately employable if they have no plans to pursue a college degree. As a matter of fact, the thinking goes, this is exactly what the TESDA aims to do with two years of technical/vocational training offered to deserving high school graduates at a cost of billions of pesos annually.

There is a small vexing problem. Within weeks of assuming office, the new TESDA head, former party-list Rep. Joel Villanueva, made public what he found — that less than one out of five TESDA scholars actually gets a job. Now, that may be due to reasons other than failure of the concept — maybe extraneous stuff like fake scholars and unscrupulous schools that collect subsidies for nonexistent students.

In any case, Villanueva vowed to get back to us after he has done some more sleuthing. Meanwhile, his predecessor, Rep. Augusto Syjuco — father of the renowned young novelist Miguel who is the latest toast of the literati world for his great Filipino novel, Ilustrado — took to the floor of Congress to denounce Villanueva. We await Villanueva’s findings with bated breath.

To get back to the main issue, the opposition to the K-12 plan (for Kindergarten-12 years), centers on the additional burden two years would impose on already impoverished families, the need to address more immediate problems like books, classrooms, school buildings and teachers’ wages, improving the quality of teachers, feeding malnourished and mentally challenged children who go to school on one meager meal a day, health care, and a host of pressing social problems that impact education — like economic development that would create jobs when the K-12 starts to flood the labor market with graduates after the planned five-year transition.

All are valid issues that needed to be addressed yesterday — so the bureaucratic pussyfooting called prioritization has not even been called to the rescue yet. Budget and Management Secretary Florencio Abad — who understands the situation better than most, having been where Brother Luistro now sits — forthwith sent Congress an additional budget request to address criticism that the education outlay originally submitted to Congress could hardly make current ends meet.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg — basic education. The 7/8ths that floats below the water line is veritable flotsam and jetsam — the detritus of years of neglect by a well-educated nation that once stood proudly as having one of the highest literacy levels in Asia. What went wrong — what went terribly wrong?

Western roots

I have a clue. Almost all the public educational systems in Europe and the New World, which the American educators brought to our shores when they sought to civilize our Old-World public school system, were devised in the mid-19th century to supply the labor needs of the great Industrial Revolution that Great Britain triggered. One of the salutary results of the revolution was the assembly-line method of manufacturing, which greatly reduced the cost of goods sold and brought many modern conveniences within the reach of the middle class.

The revolution also revolutionized our political, social and cultural life, the more important results of which were the great renaissance in learning and the emancipation of the housewife from the slavery of household chores.

European and American industries also found a wellspring of almost inexhaustible funds from the titans of industry who financed great institutions of learning to do much of the work of industrial research and development, a continuing source of product innovations to serve ever-growing consumer markets and appetites. The names are legend and are now worshipped with almost religious reverence: Carnegie, Mellon, Wharton , Rockefeller, Ford, Stanford, Nobel, to mention a very few.

Hence it should come as no surprise that the resulting educational system should be tailored to suit the needs of industry. Who holds the purse dictates policy. Businessmen have objectives other than education for its own sake — education must also power the wheels of industry.

In time the educational system began to mirror the industries that funded it. If competitive advantage came from the assembly line, what’s wrong with adopting the assembly line in turning out labor to man the wheels of industry? Indeed, why not?

Japanese system

The educational system in Japan is configured in almost exactly the same way — to supply the technical and professional needs of Japanese industries. The difference is that the Japanese system remains a model of excellence, where the European and American models have gone to seed. What happened should be cause for deeper study and research.

Maybe the Japanese model will serve our needs better than the western systems, although after four centuries of colonization we seem to behave now more like westerners than easterners — a mortally “damaged culture,” in the classic phrase of American writer James Fallows.

Meanwhile, we have educated creativity out of our children by pursuing an assembly-line educational model in an increasingly functionally job-oriented culture aspiring to employ our children in the shortest possible time to man the wheels of industry.

But where are the industries of our great Industrial Revolution?

The author is chief executive of Marbella International Business Consultancy, a think tank that specializes in business planning, management training, marketing strategy, corporate communication, and transforming political, social, cultural and technological trends into business policy that works. Comments are welcome at e-mail mibc2006@gmail.com. –Commentary — By Winston A. Marbella, Businessworld