Congested

We’re sweeping the problem under the rug.

The DepEd announced the other day that the limit for class size in the public school system has been upped to 65. That is more than double the traditional size of classes.

No wonder that the shortage in classrooms dramatically dropped from over 30 thousand to about 8 thousand. I am quite sure, although no numbers have been provided, that the teacher shortage likewise shrunk.

That does not mean that the crisis plaguing Philippine education has diminished. On the contrary, the contingency measures taken by the DepEd to meet the awesome shortages will most likely have the effect of aggravating the crisis of quality afflicting public education.

I have been a classroom teacher for 27 years. When the size of my class goes over 25, I am driven up the wall. I am sure that my teaching effectiveness will drop disproportionally to the increase in the number of students in my class. The results of my teacher evaluation questionnaire will be horrible.

And this is a class at the tertiary level. In fact, classes at the State University, where places are awarded based on a tough entrance examination.

I could not imagine how classes of 65 at the primary level could receive decent instruction.

At the primary level, pupils require close teacher supervision. The progress of each one ought to be carefully monitored. The slower learners need to be helped to keep pace.

The younger the students, the shorter their attention spans tend to be. With a class of 65, the teacher must perform cartwheels to hold everybody’s attention captive.

The teachers must be truly gifted to be able to get to know the names and faces of each pupil. Even more gifted to keep tab of each one’s progress, to spot those with learning difficulties and identify those who need extra help.

To make things worse, class schedules have been doubled up to optimize use of the facilities and service more students. Pupils trudge to school at the crack of dawn and go through a marathon schedule that ends at midday. A second wave of pupils come in at midday and leave at night.

There is no school life to speak of. School is not much more than a sausage factory.

It does not help that the DepEd’s own nutritional survey shows that about a third of our pupils are malnourished. The marathon sessions mean that, day after day, students try to learn something on an empty stomach.

If the doubled-up schedules and the class sizes are tough on the students, think of how tough they would be on the teachers.

I run a seminar for six hours and I’m useless for the rest of the day. Sometimes I’m useless for two whole days.

I cannot imagine our public school teachers delivering quality instruction to grossly oversized classes for long hours day after day. It does not seem humanly possible – especially considering that each day they must prepare teaching plans, grade piles of examination papers and, most likely, clean their classroom too.

Our school system is groaning under shortages of everything: textbooks that have to be shared by students, teachers who must teach subjects they are not trained for, students who are hungry in class. It is a wonder that some students actually get an education under these impossible conditions.

No wonder that less than one in twenty acquire mastery of the subjects. That horrendous ratio tells us that the educational system is shortchanging the pupils it must service, pupils whose life chances depend entirely on the quality of learning they acquire.

Over 95 percent of the time, as the results of senior high school tests show, the classroom educational process is actually an empty ritual. We are merely pretending that education is happening.

Our public educational system is like a Potemkin village. We see students trudging to their classes. We see teachers who appear to be teaching. But in the end, it is all an illusion. Very little actual education happens.

Why have we arrived at this level of distress?

Those romantic do-gooders who wrote in that provision guaranteeing universal tuition-free access to primary and secondary schools did not think through the logistical requirements for making that a reality. They did not work out the financials of such a guarantee.

True, there is universal access to primary and secondary education. But that access is meaningless because what the pupils receive is merely a semblance of education.

This is tokenism of the most unkind variety. Education is held out as a promise by a state that is financially unable to deliver on it.

I have always argued, at the UP, that if we do not have the logistics, the faculty strength and the research capacity, then justice demands that we cut down both out student intake and the academic programs we offer. Populism, however, dictated the contrary: we have accepted more students than we could justly service, sacrificed research in the process, allowed academic and even campuses offerings to proliferate without sufficient faculty strength.

This might be an insane thing to say, but I say it nevertheless: perhaps we might obtain better results if we accepted less students into the public schools, proportional to the resources we have to properly deliver education.

Good quality education available for a few is immensely better than mere semblance of education delivered to all. At least those few will get proper educational preparation instead of the present situation where hardly anyone leaves school with an actual education.