Classes in most schools start today. It would have been a time of great promise. No other thing influences a person’s future better and more strongly than education. Even if fortunes do not always smile, the mere fact of being educated always gives one an edge in anything.
Realities, however, have a hard time keeping in step with the promise. Almost everything associated with education in this country poses great challenges. And it does not help that the government is ill-prepared and ill-advised to help people cope with those challenges.
The cost of education is but one more area where the government has failed to control and bring to practical levels of affordability. With each passing year, affordability of education slips farther and farther away from the grasp of a growing number of citizens.
Then there is quality of education, at the root of which is the growing lack of qualified and dedicated teachers. Government has simply failed to make teaching attractive and economically beneficial.
A job that entails hard work and low pay simply cannot attract the kind of dedicated and skilled workers needed to raise the level of competence in what they do. And it is not the fault of the teachers, who have to live too. It is the fault of government.
Yet, instead of addressing the root of the problem first, the government seems to care only about the peripheral issues. To government, curriculums look better if embellished with more years, like they do in other countries, even if here the years can be as empty as a dead shell.
To government, education is more of appearance than substance. Because other countries have more years, we need to have more too to keep up, forgetting that a camotefarmer (without meaning to disparage him) will still be a camotefarmer even if spruced up in an Armani.
Adding two years to education, or even 20, without ensuring error-free teaching aids and improving the skills and boosting the morale of those tasked to teach those years will not produce the well-rounded and globally competitive graduates government foolhardily dreams of.
And with a classroom lack of 66,000 expected to grow worse than better due to neglect and botched priorities, two more years means two more years of cramped classrooms of 60 or more heads per, that is if they are not under mango trees, in which case what education is really there?