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IF there is one set of statistics to show that the Philippines is
largely dirt poor—despite the life of luxury and conspicuous
consumption exhibited by the 2 percent of the population that
sustains the elite department stores and expensive restaurants—it
is the annual decline of basic-education enrollment and the annual
increase of dropouts.
From 1995 to 2002, school enrollment grew at an
average rate of 1.98 percent yearly. Since 2003 to the last
enrollment week, enrollment has been declining by almost 1
percent—even if you count the new batch of 6-year-olds that have
been allowed to enter Grade 1.
The national dropout rate average is staggering.
Of every 100 children who enter Grade 1, only 65 reach Grade 6, only
43 finish high school and only 2 enter college.
The dropout rate is much higher in the poorest
provinces. About one-fourth of the students enrolled in Grades 1 and
2 drop out. This results in one-fourth of the population of our
poorest provinces not getting any formal education whatsoever.
Perpetuating poverty
The social and political analyst Juan T.
Gatbonton writes:
“School ‘dropouts’ make up our biggest
social problem because they perpetuate poverty. Dropouts make
poverty a generational problem, because they cannot function in the
modern economy. They cannot fill the jobs the modern economy
creates. For instance, the voguish ‘call centers’ apparently
hire at most 5 percent of all the people they interview.
“Parents who drop out of school raise children
who drop out in their turn, and children who drop out raise
grandchildren who drop out, too. Despite our enduring myth of the
school dropout who makes good, only 3 percent of farmers’ children
ever become modern professionals, according to the sociologist Gelia
Castillo.
“In 1999, the Jesuit educator Bienvenido
Nebres called our inability to provide adequate elementary education
to the great majority of our people ‘our immense and largely
invisible failure.’ The term is appropriate. The economist Cielito
Habito in August 2006 noted that education’s share of the budget
had continued to fall continuously, since the financial crisis of
1997.
Brain drain complication
“And now our dropout problem is being
complicated by a ‘brain drain.’ The composition of our OFWs is
changing in educational terms. While only 9 percent of Filipinos are
college graduates, 51 percent of all those leaving for foreign jobs
are college graduates.”
This means we have only a few college graduates
left with us now, because more than 60 percent of them have left to
work abroad. No wonder, not only call centers and other business
process outsourcing companies here (most of them foreign companies)
are finding it hard to hire young, better-than-average accountants
and computer technicians.
With the inflation and the crisis of surging
food and commodity prices, the dropout rate is sure to increase even
more.
The statistical 35 percent of the population who
are supposed to be poor will no longer be able to afford having
children at school—even if President Gloria Arroyo has ordered
public schools to make school uniforms voluntary.
Paying parents
The departments of Education and Social Welfare
have a collaborative project to “pay” parents to keep their
children enrolled. Rice for the family and some cash are given to
the poor. How long will they be able to maintain this program
considering that inflation, corruption and mismanagement make
government projects run out of money fast and inexplicably, like the
billions lost in the fertilizer scam and by the Department of
Agrarian Reform?
Gatbonton also writes: “We must accept that
education in the poor country is not a mechanically moving staircase
that effortlessly conveys children between floors of schooling until
they all get to the top floor. There are also those who get no
further than the mezzanine.
“Certainly we should try to keep pupils in
their classrooms—through school-feeding programs and ‘wages for
learning’ schemes, just as the Latin-American states do and the
DepEd-DSWD are trying to.
“But we must accept that public education in
the poor country should in fact be geared primarily to the needs of
those who have only a minimum number of years to spend in school.
Our iron circumstances suggest that we return early public education
to the basics—to reading, writing and arithmetic—to making the
experience of book-learning, no matter how brief, as nearly complete
and as useful as possible.”
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