Education’s price tag

MANY private schools would have started classes only this Monday. I heard that even in private schools a lot of parents were making frantic efforts to have their kids avoid being covered by the K+12 program of the Department of Education, unsure as they are when exactly the new system would take effect in private schools and who would be covered by it. (For instance, will graduating grade school students this year already start with four years of junior high followed by two years of senior high? How about those already in high school? And what about those schools with a Grade 7?)

If last week’s opening of public school classes could be used as a barometer then the government needs to take care of basic needs first before any tinkering with the curriculum could be successful.

While Education Secretary Armin Luistro said he was happy with the turnout on the first day of school, many parents, students and teachers were not.

Classrooms as expected were still overcrowded with teachers having to do triple shifts just to accommodate the huge number of students. This, even as the average classroom size is already as high as between 70 to 80 students.

Parents, students and teachers are probably telling themselves in exasperation that an additional two or three more years of schooling like this is the last thing they need.

According to the DepEd’s own statistics there is still a shortage of 66,800 classrooms nationwide, 103,612 elementary and secondary school teachers, 2,573,212 pieces of school furniture (school desks, chairs, blackboards, etc.), and 146,000 toilets.

The lack in school facilities has been compounded by complaints from parents about the illegal collection of various fees.

The K+12 program of the DepEd, which basically includes kindergarten, six years of grade school, four years of junior high school and an additional two years of senior high school, is supposed to make our graduates more competitive with the rest of the world by extending our school system to match theirs. But that’s granting that those two additional years would be quality years added to a vastly improved system.

Granted, there’s clearly a need for our education system to catch up with other countries, for Filipino graduates to be just as competitive, just as productive and employable as their foreign counterparts. But two more years of the same poor system won’t cut it.

Also, for the common Filipino who has enough problems scrounging around for the basic necessities, the cost of education is much too high, even the supposedly free education up to high school level. Two more years means additional expenses which they could ill afford.

We should improve what we have first before embarking on a new experiment.

There was a time in the Philippines when the graduates of the public school system were as good if not better than those who graduated from the private schools.

Public school grads spoke well, wrote well, and were good in Math, English and Science. They felt no inferiority complex and were proud of their education, which earned for them gainful employment (yes even if they’re just high school grads) or qualified them into the nice colleges, including the state-owned University of the Philippines.

In fact, the older folks among us might remember a time when those who failed to qualify in public schools ended up studying in private schools, an ignominy that is somewhat reversed in the present.

Today though, even the better private schools churn out unemployed and underemployed graduates. We’ve got kids who have earned college degrees but can’t get jobs because their education is half-baked. They don’t really have real-world skills for employment.

The government proved before that the quality of one’s education is not necessarily commensurate to its price tag because it provided quality education for free.

Unfortunately, public education presently, with its poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms, and overworked, underpaid and less qualified teachers, is no longer synonymous to good education.

Congress simply needs to secure more funding for the public school system. The Constitution mandates that education be given the highest budgetary priority, but we have one of the lowest allocations for education in the region.

If we take a look at the countries that were once our contemporaries but have gone ahead of us and left us in the dust economically, we would find out that the most important thing they did is increase their spending on education.

The more and better educated our people are the greater their chances of qualifying for 21st century jobs, thereby also uplifting our country’s economy.

We need money to improve education. It’s as simple as that. –ERNESTO F. HERRERA, Manila Times

ernestboyherrera@yahoo.com