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Education Secretary Jesli Lapus had some bitter pills
for this year’s high-school graduates and their parents. He told
them, in effect: Because the graduates performed poorly in the
National Career Assessment Examination, they should not bother
trying to get a college degree. They should opt for a technical or
vocational certificate.
Some parents and high-school
graduates immediately reacted angrily. Some teachers, too.
But Secretary Lapus is right. If
these high-school graduates don’t have the equipment to do well as
college and university students, they should do something else. They
should take up a technical or vocational course and make themselves
ready to have a job.
The other course of action is for
these young people to go back to high school. But that will not do
them much good. They finished high school without acquiring enough
knowledge, reading and research skills to prepare them for tertiary
education, because their high schools are substandard. Being
students of the same inferior schools with inferior teachers and
facilities for, say, another two years of remedial schooling will
not make them much better than they are now.
“Students need to be given
career counseling support and parents need to be informed and
reeducated to appreciate viable alternatives to the college
diploma,” Lapus said.
And this made him a villain to
some teachers and parents.
With an eye to scoring a
political point against the administration the Alliance of Concerned
Teachers’ chairman, Antonio Tinio, said: “We object to the
DepEd’s renewed focus on voc-tech insofar as it is tied to the
Arroyo government’s labor export policy. Instead of focusing on
creating jobs in our own country, government aggressively promotes
the marketing of workers overseas.”
Secretary Lapus is correct. Not
having a college degree is not the end of the world for young
people. They can prepare to have any of the 600,000 technical jobs
waiting to be filled in this country. They don’t have to have a
college or university diploma for that.
The truth is that millions of
Filipinos who have received college diplomas are in fact working as
technicians.
The European university
In Europe—and in some areas of
the United States—they value the concept of the “university”
so much. Universities have component colleges. When one finishes a
bachelor’s degree from a university it is generally assumed that
the graduate will work for a master’s and eventually a doctorate.
That’s because a university graduate is expected to be more than a
technical expert and vocational worker.
University graduates are expected
to be original thinkers, analysts and in-depth researchers in their
fields so that they become professors—not necessarily to college
students—but to their peers.
The Europeans who have worked
hard to earn certificates or diplomas in technical and vocational
institutes are honored for being the men and women who do the work.
They get very good pay and some of them are invited to join the
research teams led by university professors with doctorates.
What has happened to Philippine
higher education—just as what has happened to many good things we
copied from Western civilization—is a parody of the genuine
article.
With so many universities—many
of them unworthy of the name—the average bachelor’s degree
holder in this country is really even less educated than the UK
equivalent of a high school graduate. That is the British teenager
who has done his or her O levels. (O stands for ordinary.) The more
gifted UK kids do the A (or Advanced) levels. These have acquired
the knowledge, have done the readings and the laboratory work that
one wishes the AB “professors” teaching at run-of-the-mill
Philippine colleges and universities had.
For reasons that also explain why
the quality of the Singapore and Hong Kong civil service is much
higher than ours, the educational system in these two former British
colonies is also superior to ours.
They do not take the word
“university” lightly.
And they honor technicians with
good pay and with the gestures of respect they give professors.
We must drastically improve not
only high school but also basic education.
And we must teach our people to
realize what the phrase “college and university education”
really means.
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