Out of the box

The good news is that government means to start off the school year by making life a little easier for students. It has warned schools about inserting hidden charges in their fees, a regular practice among them, which has turned education into a business and one with very shady hues. There’s as well the practice of public school teachers selling bra and tocino to pupils, which by itself means nothing except when it influences grades. But that is a symptom rather than the disease itself, the disease being the way public school teachers are treated, which is not unlike a beast of burden. But that’s another story.

School opened last Monday, a thing I have learned over the years to look upon with more dread than anticipation. Since I started writing this column (it will be 20 years in the Inquirer at the end of this month), things have gotten from bad to worse. That’s the part where you really mind corruption. It is the textbooks that should have been there but are not, the classrooms that should have been there but are not, the dedicated teachers that should have been there but are not. Courtesy of the public officials who own big houses, drive a fleet of cars, and eat in posh restaurants, who should not be there but are.

You compare the situation here with countries like Singapore or Korea, where the ratio between PC to student is one-to-one—I dread to think what it is here—and you’ll despair.

Bad enough as the schooling situation is, even worse is what happens after the students graduate, if they at all do. Every day you see thousands of college graduates flocking to the job markets desperately looking for something, anything. That was what one of those who died when a bus was bombed in Makati a few months ago was doing, commuting to a job fair. A tragedy in more ways than one.

The way I see it, the education problem—it is a life-and-death problem—can only be solved in two ways. One is by the most aggressive intervention. Two is by thinking out of the box.

The first only government can do, which is to have raised the budget of education and not that of DSWD tenfold. It is not too late to rectify, but I’ll leave that for another day. The thinking out of the box, I have a couple of suggestions to make. In fact I have more suggestions than I have space, but two should suffice to show the direction I’m taking.

The box is thinking of education in terms of bringing students to the classroom. When Efren Peñaflorida became a world-class hero by showing precisely that you can always bring the classroom to the students. That was what his kariton classroom was, and he brought it not just to those in need of enlightenment but to those most desperately in need of it—the down-and-out, the fringe-dwellers, the poorest of the poor. He showed that there was no place too benighted, too dangerous, too bizarre to bring the light of learning to, camping out in street corners and cemeteries alike, in dark alleys and brightly lit parks alike.

Frankly, I don’t know why we don’t yet have a Kariton Classroom Bureau under the Department of Education. Or indeed an entire department unto itself. That’s the only way you can really lay out the base for universal education in this country. If you can’t bring the kids to the classroom, bring the classroom—in karitons, trucks, vans, or less mobile things like bodegas, abandoned buildings, park sites—to the kids. Before anything else, let’s get everyone to read and write, which we won’t do the traditional way. The kids don’t read and write, we won’t have a crack at joining the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

The box is thinking of education in terms of a teacher teaching students inside a classroom. When communications has exploded with mind-boggling possibilities. In Bangalore, Indian professors are making a killing tutoring American high school kids in Science and Math via the Internet. They’re way cheaper than their American counterparts, even if they have way different accents. We can always follow their example with local kids in mind. I’ll leave the part about tutoring foreign kids to the enterprising, our call centers suggesting we have no problems simulating accents.

The obvious obstacle here is that most of us do not own a PC and even fewer have a DSL connection. And as those who do have a DSL connection have found out, you cannot watch a video without the thing constantly sputtering, or buffering as it’s called. Our broadband is not really broad, it’s narrower than the space between Scylla and Charybdis.

But we do have cheap DVD players, courtesy of China, which even the poor are able to afford. And we have TVs, even if the poor can afford only the CRT variety in surplus shops. I don’t know why the education department can’t get the teachers and professors to produce DVDs for elementary and higher learning and distribute them for free along with the condoms, with all sorts of incentives for parents making their kids watch them.

At the very least, it should be useful for higher learning, if not for lower one. It’s not real time the way the service provided by the Indian professors is, you can’t ask the teachers questions, but it’s the next best thing to it.

The point is to re-imagine the classroom, pedagogy or teaching methods, and the teacher himself. Why should we be limited to the physical classroom when the entire world presents a classroom unto itself with no lack of lessons and ways of teaching them? In any case, what choice is there? Right now we’re stuck with an educational system whose quality has become the laughing stock of the world, posing a future of joblessness for most graduates. The box has closed in and become a veritable cell. There is only way to go:

Out of it.