Education Reform Blindspots: Schooling Scotoma

Monday, 14 March 2011 06:29

Written by Louie C. Montemar

It’s March and droves of our students are marching out of the formal schools. But, as the song goes: “Do you know where you’re going to, (dear graduates)? Do you like what life is showing you? Where are you going to?” When most of these marchers eventually come to realize that it is really so much easier to be students than to be part of the unemployed, then perhaps they will be better prepared to listen to the almost farcical decades-old debate about education reform in our country.

In that debate, it has been clearly established how society’s mainstream education mechanism, the formal school system, is one gargantuan funnel. Through one end, the wider one, enters masses of hope-filled young faces. Out through the narrow end march the few survivors of a brutal (at times rather brutish) reality game of power and meaning creation with heads held high and proud at least until they realize that most of them have nowhere grand to go despite their diplomas.

Inside this funnel-like social selection and classification mechanism, minds are supposedly nurtured, hearts softened, and bodies trained to purportedly serve the nation. In other words, education is supposed to be happening. Formal education is a process whereby socially relevant cultural units are acquired and transferred between and among social actors --the teachers and students. Education here is justified as necessary for a community to reproduce or better itself in succeeding generations.

Historically, public education is a particularly young institution. It is only in the era of modern, industrial society that we see the public formal school system arising and being nurtured to support the needs of an expanding capitalist economic system. As factories process physical capital, schools process human capital.

Hence, it should not be a surprise to see how the formal education set-up, ostensibly learning-oriented, actually takes on a peculiar structure akin to that of the industrial set-up. It has become a structure distinguishable from the other forms of education (informal and non-formal) by the organization of learners into units whereby learners sequentially go through levels of education and follow a pre-determined schedule --think: factory model. Knowledge here is transmitted primarily through pre-determined curricula and is systematized into discipline areas --think: specialization. To top off all these, there is the professionalization of knowledge-transmission and management according to area specializations; there are educators and educationists, some insist, the former is a teacher, the other is an education manager.

The Philippine education system is in a perennial crisis because the broader socio-economic and political structure that embeds it is in a state of perennial crisis. It is for this reason that education reform initiatives cannot be expected to do much without recognizing broader development concerns. Given the dynamics of the broader social system that frames the education system, there is a need to think out of the box, hackneyed as it may sound, to meaningfully address the so-called problems of education in the country.

I argue that saving, not just reforming, our schools means looking beyond the usual indicators of educational achievement and performance in the school system like the number of graduates produced or the survival rates of students at the various grade levels of the system. After all, those numbers are generally to be expected given the funneled design structure of the formal school system. You want those numbers to improve quickly? Change the system radically. But would you? Would we?

Beyond the extremely popular access to education or survival-in-school issue and other such pet advocacy concerns, there is, in the education reform discourse, a lack of attention or total neglect of certain key concerns as sketched below. We have a school system scotoma, a blindspot, if you will. These issues, while not usually or popularly discussed and dissected, raise crucial factors that should link education to a meaningful national development agenda.

First, how does the government really look at the role and function of state colleges and universities (SCUs) and local universities and colleges (LUCs)? SCUs are mainly national government-funded while LUCs are set-up and supported by local governments.

Are our SCUs simply meant to churn out globally competitive (if they truly can) workers for the labor markets of other countries? Can we not force these so-called mga iskolar ng bayan (people's scholars) of UP to first join the local labor pool and serve in a public agency for at least a few years before migrating and becoming part of the modern Filipino diaspora?

Regarding LUCs in particular, reports came out in 2009 that the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) wants to convert LUCs into community colleges and polytechnic schools. These LUCs are seen as “just duplicating” the functions of SUCs and therefore CHED plans to push for their conversion following a Justice department’s ruling that “the commission has supervision and control powers over LUCs despite the autonomy granted to local government units under Republic Act 7160 or the Local Government Code of 1991.” But has anything substantial happened since then? Nothing. The latest news on this simply tells us that the CHED has identified hundreds of higher education programs that are now being run in these LUCs without accreditation. Government has to put its foot down on this. Hard. Start with a strict review of the qualifications of the professors hired in these LUCs.

Speaking of teaching competencies, the second blindspot concerns the quality of teachers especially in Philippine public schools and at the higher education level. However exemplary the policy framework may be for the governance of basic education in the country and whatever passes off now as the research agenda of the CHED, the quality of education service delivery boils down to the competence of our teachers. To paraphrase a key observation of the Congressional Committee to Study the State of Philippine Education (EDCOM) Report of 1991 on the need for education reform, the teacher is at the heart of all educational change efforts.

Quite recently, another congressional body (the COMSTE), has observed that “the main reason why we rank low in international tests in the secondary level is because many Math and Science teachers in public high schools are not Math and Science majors. There are more teachers with baccalaureate degrees in Education than in Math and Science.”
Decades of lack of quality control at all levels of education have created a situation where the best minds are not attracted to go to basic education work anymore. This is paralleled in the higher education sector where tertiary institutions are churning out graduates poorly trained by under qualified instructors. In a way, the better qualified tertiary-level teachers have been elbowed out by mediocre instructors who would accept a pittance for remuneration and might even justify their at times accidental foray into the education sector as “a passion for teaching.” Worse than the best not becoming mentors are the ones who go into mentoring our young but are not even trained for it or maybe merely in-between jobs and are deluding themselves to be armed with a mission, as it were.

With low quality education, especially in science and math, the related and key issue of the science literacy of our people comes to the fore. Third, therefore, in our list comes the question of how is science literacy in the country?

It is a matter of record how bad the achievement rates of Philippine school children are. Functional literacy rate in the Philippines supposedly improved to 86.4% in 2008 from 84.1% in 2003, according to the Functional Literacy and Mass Media Surveys (FLEMMS) of the National Statistics Office (NSO). Of the estimated 67 million Filipinos who were 10 to 64 years old as of 2008, 58 million were functionally literate. These citizens can read, write and compute. Good to know these stats. Good to know our people are literate. But how do we approach problem solving in general? How is our people's predisposition towards science? We have these national statistics on functional literacy but where is our data for the country's science literacy? This government does not generate data on science literacy. How much do our people love, understand or know science? We need to count the ways.

Finally, there is a need to assess the many civil society initiatives in the Philippine education arena to further strengthen the alternative learning system of the country.
There must be a very serious recognition of the education system's inability to fully make itself accessible but also, and more importantly, relevant and accessible. However, many initiatives are out there in the field, how are these initiatives maximized or regulated if need be? So many faith-based institutions of learning are out there and are not even taxed, but how are they really contributing to achieving the educational targets of the secular institution that is government?

To my mind, the points raised here define the outlines of major blindspots in the popular discourse on and practices in education reform. Lately, the debate on education reform has, by necessity, revolved around the K12 proposal of government. On balance, however, adding a few years to the length of the schoolgoing experience will not lead much to anything if these education reform blindspots are not attended to.

For now, we can only say: March on our dear graduates! March blindly into the wilderness that is the global labor market and be export quality meat and mind with your functional English literacy --that is, until OWWA and DFA save you from whatever tragic historical twist like Libya or your friendly neighborhood employer-cum-rapists in those nations where women are treated just a bit better than camels. March on! March proudly to the tune of our country's “hidden” labor export policy!

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