EDITORIAL - Educational dilemma

Come Tuesday, some 18.8 million students from pre-school, elementary and high school will troop to public schools across the country for the opening of classes this year. For the next 10 months, classrooms will be their second homes under the tutelage of teachers as their secondary parents.

But the same problems on the scarcity of teachers and classrooms will once again meet next week's opening of classes. Existing classrooms, especially those in far-flung areas, will once again be forced to accommodate scores of students in the absence of enough teachers, while some classes will again be held under the mango trees because of the lack of classrooms.

In Central Visayas alone, the Department of Education said at least 1,144 new classrooms and 1,223 additional teachers are needed to accommodate the high number of elementary and high school enrollees this year. The region is expected to have 1.2 million students occupying the existing 24,600 elementary classrooms and 6,564 high school classrooms.

During the previous school year, DepEd records showed that Central Visayas has 25,146 elementary teachers and 8,828 high school teachers. But during a forum on the state of the country's education the other day, DepEd assistant regional director Ricarido Borgonia said that basing these figures, the region lacks 517 elementary teachers and 706 high school teachers.

The main reason for the problem on the lack of teachers is that only few teachers have taken the bait to teach at government schools given the unattractive monetary considerations.

Given the minimal salary that the teaching profession in the country offers, they just pack their things up and embark on a lucrative teaching job abroad, especially in the Unites States. Or if they chose to stay, they can land a profitable employment in call centers or in any other business process outsourcing firms.

Although the government has been trying hard to solve what went wrong with the country's education system, the problems still remain, and it seems they will stay forever since authorities have no concrete measures to fix them.

It cannot be denied that the lack of classrooms and teachers is only one of the reasons that pushed the Philippines' educational system further into the state of decay. It would certainly take a concerted effort from different sectors in order for it to reclaim its glorious status.