Not surprisingly, Louis – a former Navy man and also an avid photographer who’s married to a Filipina – is a staunch supporter and promoter of Filipino talent, having sent hundreds if not thousands of Filipino engineers and workers to the most demanding jobsites abroad over these past two decades. (Incidentally, SOS just launched Filipinas, a sumptuous collection of photographs of the contemporary Filipina in all her many roles, for which Krip Yuson and I, among others, contributed some prose. What, a company of oil-rig cowboys publishing a coffee-table book? For Louis, it’s an offering of love and thanks to his adopted home – in fact, it’s his second book on the Philippines, the first one having been written by the late NVM Gonzalez himself.)
Louis hasn’t had any complaints – until recently. For the first time, he says, his contractors began telling him about problems they were having with their Filipino crewmen’s command of English. He’s beginning to feel the pinch of the competition from countries like Russia and China – ironically, the ideological rivals of the old Anglophone empire.
I remembered this conversation with Louis last week as I followed the news about the Department of Education’s bridge program, which would require about 700,000 underperforming high school freshmen to take an extra year of study in English, science and math. The knee-jerk opposition to this program shows just how much education we really need to undertake about education itself.
A group of students marching under the banner of the League of Filipino Students-High School (can LFS-Elementary be far behind?) decried the plan as being "undemocratic" and "pro-capitalist," arguing that it would merely herd poor students to the profit mills of private schools.
Now, I understand the LFS’ or anyone’s concern about the extra expenses this will surely entail, but please let’s not confuse the economic with the educational argument. The likelihood that we can barely afford it doesn’t necessarily mean the bridge program is wrong; it just means we have to find the money, difficult as that may be.
The indisputable fact is that our kids need more schooling. Certainly they need better schooling as well for every hour they spend in the classroom – and so do many of their teachers, who after all came out of the same production line. But we’re being left behind in the global marketplace because other countries are more willing to invest their time and money in English, science and math, with most advanced countries – Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand in our region – devoting at least 12 years to pre-collegiate education versus our 10, and even developing countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos catching up with 11 years. Few of us realize it, but Philippine college degrees have a hard time getting recognized elsewhere, precisely because our transcripts tell the story: In effect, we cheated by lopping a couple of years off our requirements for a high school diploma.
It isn’t just quality teaching, the need for which is inarguable; if that were the only issue, Singapore could probably get by on 10 years of schooling, but it isn’t doing that, to preserve its edge. And it can’t be just more classroom time we need, either, but time well spent. Improving classroom teaching should follow from, and complement, the extension of class time.
In a sense, time is all most of us have. If you don’t have the money, at least spend the time (which also costs money, but this is where the government’s commitment to its own program should kick in).
Let’s not even talk about disparities among nations, but among ourselves. How can you expect your cassava-bred child to compete against someone from Ateneo or La Salle, if he or she doesn’t spend more time on basic skills? The LFS-HS misses the point – this is a step toward leveling the playing field, not deepening the divide.
Some opponents of the bridge program are warning that bridge students may be stigmatized. Even if that were true, how long can that stigma last? Who’ll care about it when you’re performing better, or working at a job? A stigma can vanish or be overcome; ignorance is more difficult to address, and its effects can be more painful and more permanent.
We in UP have a bridge program as well for UPCAT passers who score very poorly in math and/or English; they have a choice between going through the program, or hobbling through the system for the rest of their college lives. We’d prefer, however, that these bridge programs take place farther down. College education was meant for the exploration of advanced ideas, not the inculcation of basic skills.
The LFS-HS plans to collect a million signatures to show the Department of Education how unpopular the program is. They should save themselves the trouble and spend that time preparing for college, since this isn’t a question of popularity, but of national necessity.
We talk so often about "political will" in this country that you’d think it grew on trees, but come crunch time, when some really hard decisions have to be made, we fall back on awa, pakiusap, pasensya, areglo, bahala na and saka na lang. If we really care about the children of the poor, we should give them a leg up through more and better education, not dumb them down further with self-defeating objections to long-overdue reforms in our educational system. If the LFS or anyone else for that matter really wants to help, it should keep pressuring the government to increase funding for education, with which I’ll wholeheartedly agree.
(On a TV newscast, the LFS-HS spokesperson – a young lady – announced that they were going to collect "one million signs," meaning signatures; if that’s not a sign that we need a bridge program, I don’t know what is.)
Chuck was the husband of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Bebet Gozun; we’d known them both from the heady days of the First Quarter Storm, when we hung out at UP’s Vinzons Hall in military-surplus jackets and puffed Champions while talking Mao. The jackets gave way to blazers and barongs, and Mao found himself supplanted by stronger and perhaps easier faiths, but Chuck never lost the nicotine.
Grace was a fraternity "sis" who did public-affairs work for Smart, a fellow professional who, despite the knowledge and the pain of cancer, kept working and fought on bravely, requesting me with what turned out to be close to her last breath to help make sure that her daughter, an athletic scholar, was treated fairly in school.
Angelito Santos – ah, let me talk about Lito a little longer, because he was probably the most self-effacing of them all, serving as a quiet but dedicated scholar and professor. His interests, to begin with, were relatively obscure, even within the proverbial sheltered groves of academe. Dr. Santos specialized in folk literature, especially the Iluko epic Lam-ang. He wrote creatively, and wished he had more time for this passion; but he also had to take on other jobs to support his family, a UP professor’s salary being what it is, and took solace in his cigarettes and his coffee, of which he had considerably more than a couple of packs and a dozen cups a day.
Back when we were just starting out in our academic careers, Lito and I shared a room at the Faculty Center with another young instructor – Ernesto "Bobot" Bitonio, who went on to law and now serves as Assistant Secretary of Labor. Lito had married another mutual friend, the journalist and editor Elsie Kalaw, sister of journalist Lorna Kalaw-Tirol.
At his wake, Elsie recalled how Lito had finally seen a doctor after much persuasion – he had been having difficulty swallowing – and how the doctor had told him pointblank that he had stomach cancer, and needed to be operated on right away. Lito hedged, but not for the usual reasons: "I have to do my grades," he said; the semester was coming to a close.
And so he did, over the next few weeks, even if a distraught Elsie implored him to "Give them all 2.0’s!" No, Lito said, he was going to do everything fair and square. When he finished, Lito – known to be a rather gentle grader – put down his pen and told Elsie, "I never flunked so many!"
Anyone complaining about his or her grade from Lito’s class will now have to take it up with much higher authority. Not too long afterward, following a brave battle with disease and such annoyances as sometimes get in the way of intellectual inquiry, Lito Santos died – as fine a scholar and a gentleman as they come.