When the university moved out from the crowded environs of Padre Faura in Manila to the wilder precincts of Diliman after the war, UP High took up residence at the rear of the campus along Katipunan Avenue, right by the Balara reservoir. There the school sits to this day, dilapidated, unkempt, and in perpetual danger of being overrun by the road-widening construction along Katipunan.
This is the institution that handed me my high school diploma, way back in 1968 when all of us were a lot younger and a lot more innocent. Over the decades it produced a stately procession of worthy alumni, some of course worthier than the others – including the entire brood of Marcos siblings led by one Ferdinand, though we don’t like to boast too much about that anymore.
In the mid-Seventies, under then-UP President Pepe Abueva, the two secondary schools were merged with the UP Elementary School, a service school originally set up to accept grade-school children of UP faculty and personnel. All three institutions with their respective, mutually inconsistent mandates were lumped together into one UP Integrated School, thrown into the Balara compound, and told to go forth and multiply the ranks of alumni.
Prior to the merger, through the late Sixties and early Seventies, UP High graduates were in the habit of passing the UP entrance exams a hundred percent. UP Prep graduates liked to boast that, if anything, they were even better than us. This was the baseline, these were the benchmarks, on the eve of the integration.
From pre-merger passing rates of 100 percent, these days only four out of 10 UPIS graduates manage to get the UP entrance exams. For comparison, their cousins coming out of UP Rural High in Los Baños are showing 85 percent passing rates and yet worrying that these are too low.
Recent reports place UPIS below the 150th place among the high schools surveyed nationwide. Even once-lowly Balara Academy is reportedly doing better than us! This complicates the story-telling by the older alumni; now we have to qualify that we were graduates "before the integration," or "during the Sixties (or earlier)," or "when they were still teaching in English and not Pilipino."
In other words, when our diplomas still meant something and had not yet been compromised by quota-based admissions programs, linguistic nationalism, and feel-good pedagogy – the unfortunate academic homologues of an intellectual landscape at the national level dominated by knee-jerk nationalism, the remembrance of victimhood, and the easy equity of mediocrity.
The man at the helm is Mark Javier, the good-looking guru of IT over at the Ayala group. So it’s no surprise that the exercise has a look and feel familiar to any corporate planner worth his salt, i.e. review of mission/vision, assessment of gaps and needs, specification of timelined objectives, prioritization of action programs, a collaborative project management structure.
Nine programs have been identified for action in the medium term. These cover the areas of admissions & evaluation, exceptional students, curriculum enhancement, research and innovation, extension services, faculty development, organizational development, teacher education, and facilities improvement. The last one includes the show-stopper: a brand-new campus to the tune of a cool Ps 300 MM (in today’s pesos, of course).
Each alumni class is being asked to "adopt" a program; mine, for example, has chosen to work on admissions. With well over a hundred graduating classes produced by the three pre-merger schools, you would think that alumni resources are more than ample. I certainly hope so, though of course we will have to contend with the usual enemies – indifference, cynicism, tightfistedness, even the simple logistics of bridging time and distance.
As and when these young women and men go forth and begin to instruct our own children and grandchildren throughout the country’s educational system, the skills and standards they bring with them will very much be a product of what their experiences were inside the UPIS laboratory.
"Garbage in, garbage out" – this is a phrase familiar to IT practitioners as well as inventory accountants, and it resonates with special meaning in this context. When "garbage out" means, not bad software or spoiled stock, but poorly-educated children ill-equipped to fend for themselves, let alone bring this country to some measure of certifiable achievement, then all of us ought to be worried indeed.
As the rest of the world – certainly the rest of our own immediate neighbors in the region – rushes ahead towards a future of third-generation bandwidth and global supply chains, we in the Philippines are still preoccupied with translating the scientific vocabulary into Pilipino, dredging up old scores to settle from the 19th-century war against the Americans, and protecting the livelihood of miscreant bus drivers, illegal sidewalk vendors, and urban land-grabbers (also called squatters) as a "preferential option for the poor," at the expense of clean air, traffic sanity, private property, and – no small matter – the rule of law.
This is the ideology into which successive generations have been acculturated by our educational system. It’s enough to make one cry.
Against such odds, every man and woman counts. Now it’s up to the alumni to prove that they’re up to the task ahead.
And what about you, dear reader who may not be a UPIS product? When was the last time you audited your alma mater to make sure your diploma is still as good as it ever was?