Compromising the future

A study by the Department of Education cited by Rep. Eduardo Gullas that approximately 160,000 elementary and high school students are driven out of private schools each year due to spiralling costs of tuition and other fees is indeed alarming.

It is alarming because once driven out, these students have only two options to take - go to the public school system or drop out altogether. Neither of the two options are a welcome development.

While the private school system has greatly deteriorated such that no private school in the Philippines can now claim to rate highly among other private schools in Asia, it is still a notch or several notches higher in terms of quality than our public schools.

There used to be a time when public schools in the Philippines churned out highly qualified graduates, perhaps even better graduates than those from the private schools. But that was long ago, a time that perhaps ended somewhere in the mid or late 1960s.

By the 1970s, there was already a rapid deterioration in the quality of education, a deterioration that continues unabated to this day. Worse, it is being exacerbated by a parallel deterioration in the private schools.

There are probably a good number of reasons for this deterioration. But if we are to put a finger on the single greatest contributor to this " dumbing " of Filipino schoolchildren, it is none other than the corruption that sweeps through most of Philippine life.

Because of corruption, the focus that should have been given Philippine education has been greatly diluted, if not totally sidetracked. The educational department itself has been tagged as one of the most corrupt in government.

A clear example of this is the way the provision of books for Philippine schools is being handled, which is in such a way that regard for the quality of books that go into educating Filipino children takes a back seat to any and all opportunities to make a quick buck.

Each time the government places orders for textbooks with certain publishing houses, these publishing houses are obliged, ostensibly by s.o.p., to make room for huge commissions to certain officials.

These huge commissions would naturally eat into the profit margins of the publishing houses unless they recoup the amount from somewhere else. Unfortunately, there is no somewhere else except in the remaining amount needed to publish the books.

Once the publishing houses make the recovery, there is little left for the actual publishing work unless some readjustments are resorted to. And readjust, the publishing houses are forced to do.

So, publishing houses may end up hiring third rate authors and use poorer quality paper and printing materials. The end result is, of course, error-filled textbooks that seldom last long enough for one school year because of poor quality.

On the other hand, huge orders for high quality but unnecessary and unrequired reference materials are placed for no other reason than to derive commissions from them. As had been proven in Cebu some time ago, these books are just hidden away and left to rot, unused.

In the meantime, there are no incentives to attract people to the teaching professions. In the end, most of those who join the teaching profession are those who apparently could not make it anywhere else.

It is very clear that, with these things continuing to develop without abatement, the quality of education in the Philippines is doomed to deteriorate even more and the future of our country, by the way our children are educated, is seriously compromised.