MANILA, Philippines -- Some readers objected to the part in last Friday’s column in which I suggested a review of funding for state universities and colleges (SUCs) with a view to redirecting such funds to the University of the Philippines System. I was branded as biased, insensitive and elitist by non-UP graduates.

While it is true that UP does not have a monopoly of talent, it is practical to rationalize public spending on higher education by focusing support on the upgrade and establishment of UP units outside the so-called Diliman Republic rather than spreading our education budget thinly over so many SUCs.

In Sen. Edgardo Angara’s lecture, titled “Education is our future,” he gave an example of investing in SUCs in the Cordillera Autonomous Region (CAR) and named the following: Abra State Institute of Science and Technology; Apayao State College; Benguet State University; Ifugao State College of Agriculture; Kalinga-Apayao State College, and Mountain Province State Polytechnic College.

Without prejudice to any of the six institutions, wouldn’t it be more rational to pool funds in just one school rather than spreading them thinly over six different institutions? Isn’t it practical to identify one SUC or UP unit per region and draw the best and brightest there rather instead of diluting effort among so many institutions?

Unfortunately, the problem is not educational but political, and it is made more complicated by local and personal pride. Thus it is not something that can be solved by academics.

Quoting figures from Angara’s lecture, we see that both the problem and the solution in Science, Technology, Engineering and Innovation (STEI) lie in basic education. Crucial to developing a talented and skilled pool of human resources in science and technology is the quality of basic and higher education that the country provides.

It has been said much too often that our educational system has fundamental resource gaps. And such gaps have led to the lower-than-desirable number of science and technology graduates the country has. Of the 430,102 college graduates last year, engineers and technology-related graduates constituted only about 13 percent and IT 9.5 percent, while business was about 21.5 percent and nursing had 19 percent. The graduate level is even worse. For every master’s degree graduate we have, Vietnam produces six, Thailand 25 and Singapore 200.

This is not the entire picture. College graduates are products of the country’s primary and secondary educational systems. A good gauge of how our elementary and high school students are performing can be seen in the National Achievement Test (NAT) scores. The latest NAT conducted among 1.6 million Grade 6 students in March 2007 showed a mean percentage score (MPS) of 59.9 percent, a 5.28 percentage point increase over the MPS in 2006. The latest MPS means that for every 10 items, a Grade 6 student can correctly answer six items. A breakdown of the MPS, however, shows that the science score of these students is about 51.58 percent.

The MPS for the 2006 NAT of fourth year high school students was 44.33 percent, 2.6 percentage points lower than the 2005 MPS. The science score was 37.98 percent, which means that a fourth year high school student could answer only about four out of ten items correctly.

In the 2004 High School Readiness Test conducted among our Grade 6 students, only 0.06 percent got a score in the range of 75 to 100 percent, with 75 as the desired cut-off mark for passing. This means that of the 1.2 million Grade 6 pupils who took the test, only 8,043 pupils had mastered the basic competencies in science, English and math and were ready to move on to high school.

The problem stares us in the face and yet legislators will not offer, even just for this year and for the sake of our young people, to pool all their pork barrel and put the money in education. Now that will truly make a difference, but it is something we can only dream about.

Granting that we miraculously improve STEI along the lines proposed by Angara, will we have the jobs and opportunities, the climate and setting for these graduates? Or will we again, be simply a training ground for overseas Filipino workers?

This reminds me of a comment the late Nick Joaquin made that hit me in the gut: “There is so much stupidity in this country that we should export it!” In retrospect, isn’t this the result of the brain drain so long ago?

Finally, there is so much focus on the informative rather than the formative aspect of basic education. Why should we as a policy focus on improving English, science and math when we should prioritize all subjects, including history, music and sports? Isn’t basic education supposed to form well-rounded citizens and thus form a nation? Shouldn’t basic education provide young people with roots before they are given the wings to fly and work abroad?

The solutions to the problems of Philippine education have been laid down and known to us since the Monroe Report of 1925, probably even earlier, and while we would like to blame lack of funds, colonialism, the Ferdinand Marcos period, etc., the real solution to education, said Mahar Mangahas in his reaction to the Angara lecture, involves sacrifice. We can only wish people will take the bitter pill of patience because its fruit is sweet.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu

More Inquirer columns

Previous columnsf:
Real challenge in Philippine education – 1/17/08
Notes – 01/15/08
Taft and the ‘friar lands’ – 01/10/08
The monastic roots of spirits – 01/08/08
A-list of dinner guests – 01/03/08
‘A very slender and short man’ – 01/01/08
A feast of pork and fish – 12/28/07