A problem that can't wait

It has been the butt of jokes for having in its alumni roster a famous dropout who was deposed as president over plunder, and a first spouse who somehow gets implicated in almost every major corruption scandal.

But the Ateneo de Manila University (AdMU) also has a long list of illustrious alumni dating back to 1872, when Jose Rizal enrolled in what at the time was known as the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, obtaining his bachelor of arts degree in 1877 and subsequently a license in land surveying.

In recent history, the school counts two prominent victims of assassinations — Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and Evelio Javier — among its graduates. The murders contributed to campus unrest during the martial law years and the period leading to the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos (a graduate, by the way, of the University of the Philippines).

These days the longest serving president of Ateneo, Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, prefers to focus on the university’s main task, which is education.

Nebres currently chairs the Presidential Task Force on Education, a multisectoral body set up in September last year to address the crisis in Philippine education.

Among the agencies and groups represented in the task force are the Department of Education, the Commission on High Education, TESDA and the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The task force submitted its first report to the Cabinet last Tuesday, detailing proposals to improve the quality of education in the country.

Among the top targets of the task force is to reduce the alarmingly high dropout rate in elementary and high school, with cooperation from local government units and communities. The task force wants an anti-truancy law strictly enforced and a subsidized feeding program intensified.

STAR employees had the privilege of attending a special Mass celebrated by Nebres at our office yesterday.

“When people ask me what is the biggest problem of the country, (I say) corruption is a big problem… but if you ask me very personally, the biggest problem is education,” Nebres said at the Mass.

He wants to depoliticize education, believing the problem transcends politics.

“We’re trying to work with whoever politician is there,” he told me.

There is so much focus on the lack of resources and job-generating investments to ease poverty, he said, but poverty is also due to the lack of capabilities.

Making the poor capable – or, in the words of what is starting to seem like a bygone age, empowering the poor — is possible through proper education, Nebres pointed out.

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Empowering the underprivileged has long been a mission of the Society of Jesus, which runs Ateneo.

In this most joyous season in the Christian calendar, we ponder how the faith became so deeply entrenched in our country, despite the many abuses of the Spanish colonizers.

We like to say that Spain used the cross and the sword in its conquest of the archipelago that they named after their king.

Though the sword might have used the cross to conquer the land, the cross used another weapon of sorts to conquer hearts, minds and spirit: education. 

The Society of Jesus set up the first Catholic school in the Philippines. In 1595, 14 years after the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in the country, the society opened the Colegio de Manila in Intramuros.

The Jesuits developed a track record for empowering the poor and inspiring colonized people to work for self-governance. This didn’t sit well with Europe’s Catholic colonial powers: Spain, France and Portugal. They expelled Jesuit missionaries from the colonies, including the Philippines.

And so the Jesuits turned over the Colegio to the Spanish civil government in 1768 and left the Philippines. Five years later, Pope Clement XIV dissolved the Society of Jesus.

It would take 41 years before Pope Pius VII would reinstate the society, and another 45 years before the Jesuits would return to the Philippines.

Initially doing missionary work in Jolo and other parts of Mindanao, the Jesuits eventually returned to education. With authority from the Spanish civil government, the society started operating the Escuela Municipal primary school, partly with government subsidy, in Intramuros on Dec. 10, 1859. Its first 30 students were all children of Spaniards, and for a long while the school had a reputation for being the school of the ilustrados — the educated elite.

That was the start of the Ateneo de Manila, which this month turned a venerable 149 years old.

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Nebres wants to prod the nation about the urgency of improving the quality of education.

He has worked with investors who need workers but cannot find people with the required training and educational qualifications.

“The biggest problem that we face is the lack of education,” he said. “There are just too many students.”

Nebres’ task force and AdMU have borrowed training modules from foreign investors for use in Philippine schools, so that students will know what skills prospective employers need. He said several colleges in Manila’s University Belt have adopted the training modules.

To raise the quality of education in poor communities, AdMU launched a program in 2001 to train “master teachers” who can in turn train other teachers in providing quality education in public schools.

The program started with four schools in Payatas, Quezon City, and the number has since grown to 16. By next year, Nebres hopes to have the program in place in all 130 schools in the city.

“Poverty is caused by lack of opportunities, capabilities,” Nebres told us, adding that education “is not something that you can postpone.”

“Maybe you can fix our laws, but you cannot fix the problem — that these kids do not get an education,” he said.