The REVELATIONS of GRADUATION

Friday, 18 March 2011 06:43

Written by Aaron Benedict De Leon

This March, many of our young ladies and gentlemen will once again take their final bow at the august chambers of their alma mater to bid farewell to the institution which has served its purpose, to train and make them learned for challenges beyond the confines of schooling and the academe. It is indeed one of those proud moments in a student’s life, where not only their academic performance is recognized, but also marks the advent of a new beginning in their personal lives, where in they are made ready to become productive agents of our economy and society overall.

Graduation is not only a validation of a student’s achievement in the four walls of school, but also a revelation, a revelation of the standards that go with it- that it signifies privilege, honor and a responsibility, that the government, the private sector, schools and students alike are all equally accountable for.

This should not just be a moment for us to celebrate, but to look back on how many graduates more we could have produced, or how much quality and also the kind of graduates we have produced the past few years.

PRIVELEGE

The Privilege of graduation was not meant exactly for everyone to achieve. For many reasons, some students fail to reach that penultimate stage of academic life. Sure, we can attribute it to various social reasons, familial concerns and mostly out of financial matters. Thus, we must not sit in complacency and concentrate only on what we have achieved. We do not exist in a vacuum, thus we must work towards making graduation inclusive to everyone, through accessibility of education in all levels.

School participation remains a big problem in the country. When 15% of our young children are unable to attend primary school and almost 40% are not attending high school, we are headed towards a big human capitalcrisis in the future. Given these problems, we have to look at mechanisms which will enable our young people to reach the end of the educational system.

I support the passage of a student loan mechanism which allows willing and able students to acquire financial assistance from the government, at the promise of repayment once they are hired and employed, through their SSS or GSIS contributions.

We must exert every effort so that deserving high school students will not be able to say that poverty stopped them from further going to college and they had no longer have any choice for their future.

HONOR

We must also work to honor the quality of every graduate that will come out of our Educational institutions, thus, our efforts must not only be geared towards sending children to school, but to ensure they have the most conducive atmosphere to learn well, through better facilities, classrooms, logistical tools to enable and ennoble their stay in the confines of schooling.

The resource requirements of educating a population growing by at least 1.7 million souls every year continues to be a huge challenge to the government.
Thus, in order to match the growing demand for new classrooms, books and other forms of technology to support this movement, I propose that we raise our education budget by at least 5% of our GDP. But we must also bear in mind our current fiscal situation. The government must come up with dynamic solutions that will not put our debt situation worse off at the expense of incremental improvements in Education.

I propose the establishment of a strengthened National-Local government partnership in the financing of additional requirements for education, for the two levels of government to have an equitable share in the building of additional classrooms, purchase of equipment and more textbooks and hiring of new teachers. This can be done through a co-financing mechanism in as far as their Internal Revenue Allotments are concerned.

RESPONSIBILITY

The goal of any educational system is not just about teaching our young how to read and write but to provide them with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to be able to lead productive lives in society. Thus, our role is not only to provide them with the privilege to study, nor just to honor the way we provide them education, but also to ensure that they will become functional contributors to our economy and to society overall. It is our responsibility to our graduates to ensure them they will be ready to combat the challenges of the next stage of their lives- the working stage.

We must continue to leverage on public-private partnerships in establishing mechanisms capable of analyzing and identifying strategies and best practices which can be implemented at the national and local levels. This may include joint government and private sector efforts to provide parallel and alternatives learning programs for the currently enrolled, the out-of-school youth, and even a continuing education program for the adults. We must also look at stronger partnerships to reduce jobs mismatch in the country, through programs that include a more extensive implementation of youth profiling for starting careers, among other initiatives.

This would facilitate the determination of the supply of skills needed by the economy, shorten the period and reduce the cost of job search, and effectively lessen the job-skills mismatch. Direct government interventions in the labor market such as the Public Employment Services Office in every local government as well as private initiatives such as the Job Matching Radio Program, must continuously be encouraged.

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A good education does not only entail the fulfilment of a certain level, curriculum and a course. It should never be treated as an obligation that must be satisfied for compliance purposed. For a third world country like ours, it is the first step towards any development strategy we wish to implement in the long run.

A Graduate should be able to carry with himself a sense of privilege, a sense of honor and a sense of responsibility once that diploma is handed out to him, because by that symbolism, he is handed down a new duty, a commencement of eternal responsibility.

If an educational system fails to provide the necessary requirements needed to dignify those standards, then we could have less graduates, we could have less productive graduates turned professionals, we could have created a generation of dysfunctional societal agents.

Let us all remind ourselves that graduation should be a crowning glory for a student, thus we must all work, may it be government, private sector, families, schools or students alike, to make it a prestigious preparatory stage in their lives.

I hope that in the coming years, a student can proudly say, “That I’m a proud graduate, and I’m ready to make an impact in society, because of what I’ve gained, learned and done in my years leading up to this coronation.”

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