Indictment

Before the Maguindanao chainsaw massacre (and the reprehensible government response) put us on the world map for mass murder, we were basking in the glow of Efren Peñaflorida, CNN Hero of the Year.

Had it not been for an international media organization, Peñaflorida would have remained an unsung hero. Thanks to Cable News Network, and of course those who voted online to pick him as CNN’s Hero of the Year, the dismal state of public education in the Philippines has been highlighted around the globe.

With Peñaflorida’s newfound celebrity, perhaps somewhere in that large pile of accolades from politicians is a commitment to do something within their power to improve the quality of education, especially for the poor.

Peñaflorida now has the Order of Lakandula, his $100,000 CNN prize money to continue his “pushcart classroom,” plus additional logistic contributions from politicians. I hope those generous hearts realize that the first politician who tacks his poster onto Peñaflorida’s pushcart will be punished at the polls in May.

Apart from contributions to his project, a positive offshoot of Peñaflorida’s celebrity is if his example is emulated by similar kind-hearted souls. This is one case where copycats are welcome. Someone might even come up with other novel ways of bringing basic literacy to impoverished children and saving teenage dropouts from wasting their lives.

Video footage of Peñaflorida at work can tell you how hungry children are for knowledge. Those children from the slums couldn’t have faked their visible interest in what they were learning. They were clearly enjoying themselves and listening in rapt attention as they were taught the alphabet. They were thoroughly fascinated, as all children are, as they peered into a computer – another part of the learning experience in Peñaflorida’s mobile classroom.

The capacity of the human brain to absorb knowledge is acute in early childhood. A young child learns different languages and grasps new concepts very quickly. That capacity must not be wasted; children need full intellectual stimulation.

Many governments around the globe have recognized this – I have mentioned the example of Chile under its president, pediatrician and single mom Michelle Bachelet – and are pouring resources into early childhood education for all, including kindergarten and even pre-school.

Our Constitution mandates free and compulsory primary education for all. But like many of the provisions in that Constitution, this one is a best-efforts pledge, with no promise that free means quality education.

The free education starts at Grade One. At this point, underprivileged students in public schools are already at a disadvantage when compared with their counterparts in exclusive schools.

By first grade, the typical pupil in an exclusive school would have undergone up to three years of preparation, from play school to prep and kindergarten, with all the toys and other instruments of learning available in such schools.

These children would maintain their edge over their less privileged counterparts, as they enjoy access to the Internet and probably have their own computers at an early age. By the time they graduate from high school, the knowledge gap between the typical rich and poor students would be a yawning chasm.

Internet centers at least have become ubiquitous nationwide, with some of the cheapest rates in the world, at about P35 an hour, allowing children without computers at home to be acquainted with cyberspace. But even that amount can be beyond the reach of people who must scrounge around for money to put food on the table.

I know parents who can’t afford to pay even P100 for tuition per semester to send a child to kindergarten. These are the parents who can’t afford to buy uniforms or give their children a regular allowance for transportation and snacks during school days.

These are the parents whose children end up in the streets, learning early to survive on charity or through their own toil in city dumps, as Peñaflorida did, growing up in the slums near the dump of Cavite City.

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The Department of Social Welfare and Development has an ongoing program to encourage impoverished parents to keep their children in school. Parents receive direct dole-outs from the DSWD as a reward. The program is supported by organizations such as the World Bank.

The DSWD is doing its job. The other part of the mission is providing quality education to the children who don’t drop out.

Peñaflorida was lucky enough to win scholarships from grade school to university. I would imagine that he isn’t using any of the defective textbooks exposed by private crusader Antonio Calipjo Go in his pushcart classroom, and that he can spot factual and grammatical errors in government-issued textbooks.

Generations of Filipinos are growing up undereducated and wrongly educated, because of error-filled textbooks and teachers who lack the qualifications to spot the errors.

I know high school graduates who are employed as blue-collar workers and are skilled in their respective fields. They dream of working overseas for higher pay but don’t bother to apply for jobs, believing they lack the necessary knowledge and communication skills to survive abroad.

Part of Peñaflorida’s mission is to give out-of-school youths the interest and confidence to pick up where they left off in their interrupted education, and then to find their place in the world.

His life’s work is an indictment of the state of public education in this country, and his passion should inspire reforms.