EDITORIAL - Calamities another reason to scrap K+12

Chances are, natural calamities are not going to get any fewer. More probably, not only will they get to be “many-er” (if we are to borrow from that successful lechon manok ad), they will also tend to get nastier.

Now there are two things that we have learned from natural calamities. While they spare no one, it is always the poor who tend to get hit the hardest. And, for a variety of reasons, it is always the school system that gets skewed when calamities strike.

In a country that has never learned to make long-term preparations for calamities despite being prone to their occurrence, it is always the schools that we convert into evacuations centers and for periods that make school schedules go haywire.

When disaster strikes, and strikes the poor, it is always the schooling of the children of the poor that gets to be sacrificed first. When the poor lose everything, it is food that must be found first. Then shelter. Then clothing. Then medicine. Forget about schooling.

Ranged against the prospects of more calamities due to changing weather patterns brought about by global warming and climate change, it does seem that the prospects for proper schooling for the poor (and even for the not-so-poor since weather strikes everyone) look ominous indeed.

And this should add to the other reasons why government should rethink its stubborn insistence on implementing the two added years to basic education. The introduction of natural calamities as a factor affecting education seems like God is trying to send a message here.

The idealists at the Department of Education, who have no less than the president hooked by the nose, are fired up by no other cause than enviousness (everyone is doing it but us). Their heads are so high up the clouds their feet dangle way above the ground.

Government has no business adding more years to education when it cannot even guarantee proper completion of a given year due to increasing incidences of natural calamities for which the same government is totally unprepared for.

If reason and the reality on the ground cannot dissuade the government from implementing the K+12 program this year, perhaps divine intervention can. When the voice of God calls, you kneel, even if you are a Catholic university president, or the son of political saints.