Guava is English for "bayabas"

In the course of the holidays, I have had the opportunity to interact with a good number of children, all of them of grade school age, and all attending public schools in different areas in the Visayas.

I played very simple mental games with these kids, usually involving my asking them the English words for common or everyday things, such as toys, animals, plants or numbers. Then I made them spell out their answers.

I made the games interesting by promising gifts to those who got the correct answers. Being mostly poor kids, the prospect of getting gifts allowed them to overcome both shyness and fear, and they responded to my questions with great enthusiasm.

To my shock, however, I discovered how miserably low the levels of knowledge of these children were. I could not, for example, imagine that a grade two pupil, even if she was just in a public school, would not know that the English word for “bayabas” is guava.

Had I not specifically chosen to make our interaction take the form of a game, I probably would have been angered by the children’s failure to spell even such a simple word denoting a very common object as a coconut.

Jesus Christ, what future do these children have if, at grade two, they do not know that “bayabas” is guava in English or that the word coconut is spelled as c-o-c-o-n-u-t and not as k-o-k-o-n-a-t.

Another grade two child of whom I asked the English term for “salamin” stared at me blankly until I provided the answer — mirror. At this, her face lit up and she sang: “Ahh, pareha diay sa mirror, mirror sinta.”

I could not help but laugh. But the laughter was automatic. It was a reflexive response that I did not intend to make. For underneath my laughter was the sad realization that the great deterioration of education was more real than anybody who talks about it ever realized.

I asked some of the children what their teachers did to teach them their lessons and most replied that the teachers would write things on the blackboard. I asked if, after writing, they would discuss what was written. They said no. They were just asked to copy what was written.

Of course I had no way of validating what the children said. It is even possible that the children I happened to interact with simply did not belong to the upper levels of the class. But then, for anyone not to know that “bayabas” is guava in English is indeed very disconcerting.

For any one grade two child, even just one grade two child in a million other grade two children to not know that the English term for “bayabas” is guava is to me already a very serious indictment of our educational system.

What on earth are we doing in our educational system that we cannot even teach one single solitary grade two child that “bayabas” is guava in English. And why on earth should we try to compare ourselves with other countries when right here, right now, guava is as alien as Mars.

Our hypocritical government wants us to add two more years to basic education because that is supposedly what the other countries are doing. Of what use are those two more years when at grade two, after the first two years, some kids still have not heard of the word guava.

Maybe we should use the mirror — as in that little girl’s “mirror mirror sinta” — to look at ourselves and see whether adding two more years to basic education deserves more priority than fixing the educational system first until it is ready to take on two more years.