The educational divide

Where’s the integer function? My 11-year-old nephew wanted to know. He was fiddling with a pocket calculator with an odd design that I had given him.

His clueless aunt, who nearly flunked Math 11, shot back: What on earth is an integer function? The boy shrugged. Like many kids growing precociously in the Information Age, he’s used to adults who can’t help him with his homework (they never taught us that), much less help him find the integer function.

Stupidity loves company, so I asked a student who graduated yesterday from high school, at the top 10 of her class, if she knew what an integer was. Sure, she said, something taught in Algebra, but she’s forgotten exactly what it is.

Aha! I am not alone.

But then I wondered why she didn’t know, and came up with some depressing possibilities. Perhaps it’s true that most women’s brains are not wired for anything connected with numbers. More likely, my nephew who’s entering sixth grade in June has enjoyed better education in an exclusive private school — an education that is way ahead of anything the poor high school graduate could ever hope to get in her city-run public school.

I asked her what subjects were taught in her four years, and learned that the curriculum was similar to the one I had in high school.

In many private schools, however, that curriculum has been upgraded so much in the past years that what I learned in junior high in a private school my nieces and nephews were taught in fourth grade.

There is a growing divide in the quality of education among different generations, but this is to be expected, given the rapid advances in almost every aspect of modern life. What is worrisome is the widening educational divide in this country between rich and poor.

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At the Philippine Science High School, where education is fully subsidized by the state and should therefore benefit poor students, few children from low-income families can hurdle the qualifying exams — possibly the toughest in the country.

The result: the school’s student population is looking more and more like those you see in expensive private schools.

You see the same thing happening in the University of the Philippines, where a socialized tuition scheme has failed to keep out the rich, who want the UP prestige. What’s a few thousand bucks in college tuition to parents who can spend from P40,000 to P500,000 per semester for their kids’ grade school education?

Even when I was a UP student and the tuition averaged about P360 per semester (P420 with laboratory), there were already too many moneyed kids on campus, speaking English with that lilt peculiar to those born to a life of pampering.

How can the poor compete, when children in exclusive grade schools are taught subjects such as geometry several years ahead of their counterparts in regular public schools?

At home the lucky children have their own computers apart from PlayStations, home theater systems and all the toys they can dream of. At home their less fortunate counterparts must help with housework; many, like that high school graduate, actually work for a living to augment the family income.

The gap in the quality of their education is widening at an alarming rate.

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The student whom I asked about integers graduated yesterday from the Las Piñas East National High School, a city-run institution at the Verdant Acres Subdivision in Barangay Pamplona. President Arroyo has visited this school, touted as the country’s model public high school.

Assembly time for the graduation at 8 a.m. was set at 6:30 because there were 1,128 graduates and they were warned that seats could run out. The student claimed her rented toga the other day for P100. She received a gift of P100 from the city government – a one-time transportation allowance for graduation.

Class 2006 of Las Piñas East had 17 sections. Each class had 66 to over 70 students; to accommodate all the students, classes were held in two shifts daily.

Throughout her four years in high school, the girl was never taught to use a computer. The school’s computers are kept in a room, used only by teachers.

In their senior year her class of 66 shared 19 textbooks for their English subject and about 50 physics textbooks. There were no books for the other subjects. The number of available textbooks was an improvement from previous years.

If there was any lesson in those four years about integers, it must have been buried in some textbook that she barely managed to read.

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My 11-year-old nephew, on the other hand, learned to use a computer at about the same time as I did. My niece is using Voice Over Internet Protocol to chat with relatives in the United States.

People of my generation sometimes talk about missed opportunities. What could we have achieved if in grade school we could access a world of information and chat with friends around the world at the click of a mouse? If we, mostly middle-class citizens of a developing country, had received world-class education in top universities abroad? This is something that has been made so much easier for younger generations by the forces of globalization and information technology.

Yet we still count ourselves lucky. There are millions of Filipinos who would be happy to get the kind of education that we received ages ago, the kind that privileged kids now find pathetically inadequate.

The education gap between rich and poor develops from the earliest age. Free public education starts at Grade One; kindergarten is optional and is not free. Privileged children, on the other hand, get an early head start, with playschool at age 3, prep school at 4 and kindergarten at 5.

By their high school graduation, they have enough background to become citizens of the world, ready to compete among the best in a knowledge-based global economy.

Only a small fraction of the country’s workforce gets this kind of education. In English proficiency alone, the impoverished majority can never catch up.

The valedictorian of Philippine Science, who finished her primary education in exclusive private schools, has received offers of full scholarship from colleges in the United States, where she intends to finish tertiary education. She has created her own website. Her female brain is wired for math and the sciences; she wants to become a scientist.

The graduate of Las Piñas East will work this summer. With financial assistance, she hopes to become a caregiver.