032 Education Agenda
This would be the first election in recent memory that didn’t offer the voting public a detailed discussion on each candidate’s education agenda.
In part, it’s due to the fact that there were too many candidates (for president, no less than 10), such that everything spoken during the officially sanctioned debates were limited to meaningless motherhood statements. In education, we heard nothing other than the tried and tested promises of more classrooms and more benefits for teachers. In the age of the pandemic, we were offered more promises, this time, of a technological nature ranging from laptops and tablets for students and faster internet connections.
We heard nothing from the survey front runner. For starters, he didn’t even show up in the two debates sponsored by the Commission on Elections. Then you hear a lot of complaints from both your local and international press about not getting enough access to the candidate. So again, it’s safe to surmise that it’s all about classrooms and computers.
We heard nothing about the deep-rooted problem of quality in basic education. One candidate did opine that there is a need to declare a crisis in education, which is promising (But it’s not yet clear what interventions would be introduced with this declaration, precisely perhaps due to the limited time to talk about one’s education agenda).
Another candidate comes with a local government background, and I fear that this might limit this person’s appreciation of education issues (as is the tendency of local government execs, education may be seen merely as a question of appropriating more money for public schools—for more classrooms, computers and chairs—which of course shouldn’t be the case).
A few also-rans hinted at repealing K-12, but I fear that this stand is more politically motivated than one actually based on a clear understanding of Philippine basic education (Full Disclosure: I was a staunch critic of K-12 when it was under deliberation, and although I still stand by my criticism of K-12 as it was designed then at applied now, I think that ship has sailed and that there’s no turning back).
We can only guess who’d win and we can only hope that the new president will have a better appreciation of basic education than what is being presented for far, by the media and their respective campaigns.
Needless to say, we can only pray that they put in the right people in the education department, people who can offer real solutions and not merely attempt to fix our schools by simply adding more resources.
We must also not fall into the trap that basic education is entirely about the pandemic, even though we’re still in one. The quality of education of our K-12 schools has long been a problem (When I joined the education department in 2005, we already recognized it as a crisis), one that has not been fixed—not because any particular person is at fault—but because the problem is too huge to be addressed just by a solitary policy or program intervention.
Still, I still say there’s a way to fix basic education in the Philippines. It requires us to innovate in a big way and not rely on the same solutions that just won’t suffice, no matter how good they may all be.
In the end, as I’ve said many times before, the education sector must be spared from the usual political tensions and disputes that have plagued the national discourse for so long. We need everyone—from all political persuasions—to be part of the village that we said we need to educate the child.
Whoever wins, we must all continue to be part of that village. With the future of over 26 million Filipino children at stake, it’s the only way for Philippine basic education to succeed.