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By Juan T. Gatbonton, Editorial Consultant
Education in our country—like our economy and
our politics—has a dual nature. Global employers give us high
marks for our managers and our skilled workers, but not for our
unskilled workers. And our two-class school system starts early.
The children of parents who can afford the
expense go through 14 to 15 years of basic education, starting with
“play” and prep school. The rest get only 10 years: six of
elementary and four of high school. We’ve the shortest basic
schooling period in East Asia. Government also spends far less on
our school children than comparable neighbor states do. Thailand
spends six times more, and Malaysia 10 times more, on every
schoolchild than we do.
Dropping out of school
Virtually all Filipino children of the right age
enter grade 1, but only six out of 10 finish grade 6. Only four
finish high school, and only two enter college. Yet the correlation
between education and poverty is plain. Our poorest households are
those whose heads have no formal education at all (10 percent of the
poor); and those who had no more than an elementary education.
The above figures represent national averages.
In our poorest provinces, dropout rates are much higher: About 25
percent in grades 1 and 2, meaning that a fourth of people in these
poorest provinces get no formal education at all.
As of January 2008, there were 2.7 million
jobless Filipinos. Half of them are between the ages of 15 and 24:
And 62 percent had no more—or even less—than a high-school
education.
Perpetuating poverty
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.
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.
What others are doing
What are we to do? We can learn from what other
nations with high income-inequalities are doing. Brazil and Mexico
offer social models we should look into. In both countries, one
family in five receives a small monthly stipend—provided it keeps
its children in school and takes them for health checks.
There are apparently two stages in basic
schooling during which children are most likely to drop out. The
first is early primary. The second is middle high school, when the
child becomes old enough to start working.
To keep young children in school, Brazil and
Mexico offer free school meals. More recently, they’ve also
started giving pupils small amounts of cereals and other basic foods
to take home—the quantity pegged to the number of days they’re
in school. For older potential dropouts, the two governments have
“wages for learning” schemes. Older children are “paid” to
stay in school, in amounts approximating what they would earn as
“start-up” workers with no skills.
Of course we may not have either the money or
the administrative capability to carry out social programs of this
magnitude. But we should make a start—at least in our poorest
provinces. Negros Occidental apparently has a fairly large
school-feeding program already.
No escalator
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. 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 ironic 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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