Back to school

There were a couple of interesting stories last weekend before the kids stormed back to school yesterday (Monday).

The first was a proposal to shift to a 3-day school week for several public schools in Caloocan to ease the congestion of classrooms there. The plan called for dividing the students into two groups coming to school on alternate days. The proposal met with opposition from parents however, which forced the Department of Education to shelve it at least for this year. It would instead work out some kind of student transfer and shuttle service for overcrowded schools in Valenzuela, Caloocan and Quezon City. But should the congestion reach a “worst-case scenario,” the DepEd still retains the option to implement the 3-day school week.

I noticed this small piece of news because it came alongside a big one, which was the President announcing that he had just approved P62.3 billion for huge infrastructure projects that would improve water supply, mass transport systems, and the country’s hospitals and airports. Only two of these projects will even be started in the remainder of P-Noy’s term—an LRT 2 maintenance program in Manila and a rapid bus transit project in Cebu. But the assignment of the money is there.

Of course the move is laudable. Quite apart from the impact of massive infrastructure spending on sustaining economic growth, it shows foresight, or the President’s capacity to reckon beyond his term and think of legacy. Its drawback is the item above: What happened to investing just as massively, if not more so, in education?

You have to be astonished that at this late day we can still be beset by lack of classrooms such that we have to resort to things like a 3-day school schedule or shuttling bedraggled kids from one school to another. Those are not conditions that conduce to learning. I myself have always thought that the solidest, strongest, more lasting infrastructures are not those that are laid out in physical space but in hearts and minds. Of the children’s above all, of tomorrow’s generation above all. So why are we so frenzied about the first but tepid about the second?

The contrast between the two items hammers home the point. Education is not our priority, and it shows. It shows not least in the figures. Though the budget for education has been growing in absolute amounts, it has been contracting in relative terms. Going by Freedom from Debt Coalition’s figures, our current budget for education is only 2.2 percent of gross national product, well below the world benchmark of 6 percent. Unesco says we have the lowest expenditure for education in proportion to total budget. Since 1955, education has dropped from 30.78 of the budget to 15 percent post-Edsa. Our current one is even lower than the post-Edsa average of 15 percent.

It shows even more in a mass of barely literate and numerate Filipinos huddled in obscure corners of what Dan Brown was pleased to call the “gates of hell.” The height of whose ambition is to learn a skill or two to land a job as a seaman. As late as the 1970s, the Thais and the Malaysians were crowding into the University of the Philippines and the International Rice Research Institute to learn English and the sciences. Today they have left us biting their dust. A good deal of this has to do with education. They have continued to be big on it. We have gone on to be small on it.

Education is not an option, it is a necessity. It is not something we can put on hold and decide to do only later. We do not educate the teeming uneducated now, and we will widen the knowledge gap between ourselves and our neighbors. A thing that is frighteningly wide enough now as it is, if you just compare ourselves to Malaysia, never mind Singapore. The Constitution wisely assesses education as the most important concern of this country, and deserves utmost priority. Not doing it—that’s the most unconstitutional thing of all.

The second story is the proposal by

Rep. Kimi Cojuangco for an “open high school system.” The system will use print, radio, TV and the PC, satellite broadcasts, teleconferencing and multimedia to allow people to learn on their own without need to go to a classroom. And be accredited for it.

I’m all for it, as well as for other experiments that explore new developments. Why should we be limited by the classroom? The opportunities for education are legion, which digital technology in particular has opened up. These opportunities aren’t just the next best thing to the classroom, they’re even better than the classroom.

I myself would go even further and say that government, or the DepEd, or the private sector should not wait for the poor, who are most of us, to come to the classroom, they should bring the classroom to the poor. If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed. The task of educating—or at least eradicating illiteracy in—this country is urgent and requires the most aggressive efforts to do it. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again and again. The template is there, which is the “Kareton Classroom” Efren Peñaflorida pushed quite literally in slums, narrow alleys, and cemeteries, which made him CNN Hero of the Year in 2009. It’s an inspired idea, and bears not just sustaining but replicating all over the country. And not just with literacy but with basic education in mind. Frankly, I don’t know why this hasn’t happened yet. We have a private-public partnership program that can launch it in a big way. More importantly, we have a remarkable spirit of  bayanihan, or voluntarism, that manifests itself in a phenomenal way in the aftermath of disasters to harness for the purpose. That’s when everyone comes out to give of their possessions and of themselves to help the  nasalanta.

Ignorance is a far bigger disaster than “Yolanda.”