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From education to miseducation

Because I suck at math, I don’t really understand all these statistical data being shown everywhere about the declining quality of education in the country. All I can understand is that the lack of classrooms number in the thousands, and the lack of books and chairs add up to hundreds of thousands. Please, do not get me started trying to evaluate and quantify the competence of teachers and students: I would be dealing with polynomials and exponents.

It sounds as if the “quality of education” has been reduced to totals and discrepancies: does this really count? No, not to a student like me who could care less about calculating differences and quotients. The real indicators of the declining quality of education are those who are directly affected by it: students. College students who pay so much for a degree that would land them nowhere, except to be another person added up to that tally of the unemployed. Or high school and elementary students who end up weeding gardens and saying the Scout Pledge all over again, as if they mean something.

The declining quality of education is something that is best left described, and not lost in this sea of numbers. Think about it: does it matter to a student who has to pay fees adding up to the thousands to even count statistical data? No way! I guess prepaid internet cards and holographic ID stickers make so much more sense than people blabbing about percentages. A student being unable to afford to buy the teacher’s polvoron or tocino is proof enough of Paulo Freire’s “banking method” of education. You do not need to count the ratio of students to books: the same books IM3 used back in my high school days are still the same books used today, with the same missing pages and identifying marks in page 46 or something. You do not need to count the number of chairs in public schools. They only comfortably seat half of a student’s butt.

I still make my occasional visits to my old high school and still see these cliches on the beams and the walls: Education is the key to a better future, The youth is the hope of the future. Right.

What future? The grim truth is that everybody talks about improving the quality of education in the Philippines, but nobody does something about it. It is not enough that politicians donate these school buildings named after them, or that two-shift policies are enforced in some schools. It is not enough to streamline subjects, prioritizing Math, English and Science over social and cultural subjects. What is enough is for politicians to exert the necessary political will to provide for genuine reforms in the educational system and to do something about the obscene cost of learning. What is enough is for the government to give equal and just priority to every subject in the curriculum, and not to be OFW factories.

But this is no place to be steamed or angry at all. The declining quality of education is, well, humorous. It is something to be laughed at. I think that there’s a certain sort of comedy in students being commensals, footnotes and exponents to a government which doesn’t really care about education and would rather focus on image problems and PR. The declining quality of education cannot be seen in the statistics alone...

And the way the government still parades around the idea that they’re doing something about education. Now that’s funny.# Marck Ronald Rimorin for NORDIS

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