Beyond schooling

For the second time in just over two years, President Marcos has appointed a new Department of Education (DepEd) secretary. He has explicitly expressed his expectations from DepEd under former senator Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Angara: “We go back to make sure that everybody understands the basics. There are many students in Grade 5 and Grade 6 who still have difficulty reading and understanding what they read. They cannot solve simple mathematics problems. We must go back to the basics. That’s what we will do.” This clear and categorical mandate requires going back way before Grades 5 and 6, even before children start school.

To improve basic educational outcomes, the government must address the problem of malnutrition, affecting 30 percent of early learners. This is the silent, ticking time bomb serially crippling every generation that suffers through it. Past a certain point, the malady permanently limits the children’s capacity to learn, aggravating the problem and raising its cumulative burden and costs. Investments in additional classrooms, curricular reform, and additional training and incentives for teachers are necessary, but they will not achieve the level of learning expected from children who go to school hungry. Even the Divine Teacher had to perform the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes to make sure the people were properly fed before He began teaching them the Gospel values.

Educators and governments have long recognized the impact of the socioeconomic environment and learners’ health conditions on their learning achievement. In 1942, the Philippine Commonwealth agency in charge of education, then known as the Department of Public Instruction, was renamed the Department of Education, Health and Public Welfare. Ironically, the change was mandated by Japanese occupation forces, when education, health, and public welfare all suffered devastating damage during the war years. However insightful this vision of the agency’s coverage, the branding imposed by the Japanese could not survive their defeat. The independent republic reduced the scope of the agency in 1947, calling it the Department of Education. The label stood until 1972, when Proclamation No. 1081, which established martial law, also added “Culture” to its title. The change, incidentally, allowed the department to support the cultural concerns of First Lady Imelda Marcos.

With the shift to a parliamentary system in 1978, the department became the Ministry of Education and Culture. More substantive changes came in 1984, when the government extended the reach of the ministry to cover, not health, but sports. In fairness, the link between health and learning, made explicit by the Japanese puppet government, was not completely forgotten. In 1974, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. established, by Presidential Decree No. 491, the National Nutrition Council (NNC) to introduce nutrition programs into the educational system. Through the NNC, the education agency implemented feeding programs in schools and incorporated hygiene, health, and proper nutrition lessons into the curriculum.

The School-Based Feeding Program (SBSP) was a worthy initiative introduced by the martial law regime that it supported for over a decade. But even with the power and resources at its command, the authoritarian government proved unable to defuse the malnutrition time bomb. Surviving the downfall of martial law, succeeding, post-martial law administrations continued SBSP but also failed in curbing malnutrition. The failure, 50 years after it had been identified by scientific experts and political decision-makers as a priority concern, is a perplexing governance puzzle. The churches, business, and civil society have flagged it as an urgent, time-bound issue that needed greater attention and resources. No one in government has dared to dispute the point, but agreement in principle did not lead to sustained action.

The problem persists. Running regular national surveys since 1998, the Social Weather Stations has not detected any long-term decline in hunger. Its most recent report recorded the “moderate hunger” rate rising from 8.4 in September 2023 to 12.8 last June and “severe hunger” from 1.3 to 4.9 percent. When hunger strikes, the impact tends to fall more heavily on women and children. DepEd must continue and even expand SBSP as a coping measure to mitigate malnutrition among its pupils. Fortunately for DepEd, malnutrition is neither its primary mission nor core competence. Maternal and child health experts in the Department of Health, Department of Social Welfare and Development, and their allied agencies bear greater responsibility for this problem.

Unfortunately for DepEd, how effectively other agencies do their job will affect the children’s later performance in school, which will reflect on DepEd’s own evaluation. DepEd should get some slack for a factor in its assessment over which it has little control. DepEd, in any case, has enough basic problems on its plate for which it can be held accountable.

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Edilberto C. de Jesus is professor emeritus at the Asian Institute of Management.

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