Beg, steal, or borrow

I myself am not a great fan of K to 12. I know it’s now law and is on its second year. The Department of Education says the implementation is getting better, as schools get to iron out the kinks of last year. But whether it is or not, I don’t know that the program will really make a huge dent in the huge problem of education.

Let me be clear: I believe in education, I’m big on education. If there’s one thing I think will bring us out of the rut of poverty, it is education. If there’s one thing I think will make us less desperate, benighted and hopeless, it’s education. If there’s one thing that’s going to stop us from thinking in terms of surviving and climbing out of the pit and start thinking in terms of forging ahead and being better than everybody else, like Singapore, it’s education.

I said yesterday that the challenge for government is going beyond growth to curbing, if not eradicating, poverty, and the only thing I see doing that is education. Not security, not the CCT program, not roads and bridges. You take a bus on Edsa and see the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and you wonder how they’ll get anywhere. Education is the only way they will. From manual exertion to unleashing brain power, from digging ditches to ditching squalid digs, from subsisting to being human.

Doubtless, adding a couple more years to grade school can improve the quality of education. But probably only at the margins, and probably only at the cost of reducing the number of kids public elementary school will reach. It’s too big a cost for too little a return.

I myself see the problem of education as needing to educate the entire population and not just a portion of it. For that to happen, we need to see what needs to be done and what possibilities exist to do it.

From where I stand, what needs to be done first and foremost is to enlarge the scope of coverage of education rather than to deepen it. For those who can afford the latter, fine. Their kids can have as much schooling as they want, going on to high school and college. For the poor and huddled masses, who are most of us, the agenda should be to cover as much of them as possible to make them as literate and numerate as possible. That is the sine qua non of things. You can’t read and write and count, you won’t have a chance in life. You won’t have drive, you won’t have possibility, you won’t have hope. Worse, you’ll pass that attitude—and fate—on to your children, who will pass it on to their children.

Of course this will require massive expenditure from government, far more massive than it is spending now. I myself don’t care if it nips and cuts and takes from the other departments to do it, it’s money better spent. Indeed, I don’t care if it begs, steals and borrows, not least from abroad, to do it, desperate times call for desperate measures.

But here’s where the public-private partnership should help enormously. Here’s where that partnership ought to be directed to, even if exclusively. By all means give the private sector all sorts of incentives, by all means cajole it, exhort it, twist its arm. But get it to help put the kids to school. Get it to help bring truly universal education to this country.

While at this, why not use the volunteers to help in this as well? The same volunteers that flocked spontaneously to help in P-Noy’s campaign, the same volunteers who believe in Edsa, the same volunteers who constitute People Power. The same volunteers who materialize spontaneously during storms, floods, and earthquakes to help. The same volunteers who are just waiting in the wings, waiting to be unleashed.

Efren Peñaflorida showed how one person’s initiative can have a far-reaching impact in getting the poorest of the poor to read and write and count. His “kariton classroom” is a magnificent and inspiring creation. All we need to do is replicate it throughout the country through the volunteers, quite apart from the DepEd. Don’t wait for the impoverished kids to go to school, bring the school to the impoverished kids.

Beyond this, why stick to formal education to educate this country? The possibilities spawned by the technological revolution are boundless, the possibilities raised by computers, the Internet, electronic reading devices are endless. All you need to do is spread them, and they will detonate learning more powerfully than dynamite. As you can see with the ease with which 5-year-olds use tablets, these things are their language, these things are their world. You make them available or accessible to most everyone, and you can get rid of textbooks and schoolbags and various accessories that cost an arm and a leg for the poor.

In case you don’t know it, most literature books that are sold in bookstores are now public domain and can be downloaded legally in the Internet. In case you don’t know it, too, most books can be downloaded, if illegally, from cyberspace. But if that’s what it will take to get Pinoys to read and write, then I’m all for it. Survival trumps property rights.

Government doesn’t need to foot the bill for all this. Again, there’s the private sector for it. In fact, there are the private citizens for this. Not least the Pinoys in the United States and other countries who can always be inveigled or cajoled into parting with their used or surplus PCs and laptops and tablets and Kindles and shipping them back home. Quite apart from the various donor agencies who can be importuned for aid in this respect. If people can donate all sorts of relief goods after crippling floods, they can donate all sorts of gadgets after crippling lack of learning. Ignorance is the greatest disaster of all.

Beg, steal, or borrow, but educate, educate, educate.