EDITORIAL - School opening blues

 Even without the devastation caused by the calamitous monsoon rains and floods, the opening of the school year was not expected to go smoothly. For several decades now, the public school system has suffered from chronic shortages of practically everything – from classrooms to teachers, textbooks, learning gadgets and other school supplies and even safe water.

The ongoing repairs and cleanup of schools damaged by the typhoon-enhanced monsoon, which have delayed the opening of classes today in hundreds of schools, are mainly additional aggravations in an education system that has been in crisis for many years now. The crisis has affected national productivity and competitiveness, widened income gaps, weakened democracy and made the task of poverty alleviation more challenging.

The school year opens with a new person in charge of the Department of Education, and what looks like the looming end of the mandatory use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3. The Senate recently approved on third and final reading a bill seeking to discontinue the mandatory use of the mother tongue in the first four years of basic education, and proposing instead a return to the use of Filipino and English, with the mother tongue as supplementary language medium.

Senators hope the use of the proper medium of instruction will improve students’ comprehension of their lessons and boost overall learning. In the few times that the country participated in the Program for International Student Assessment, the results showed Filipino 15-year-old students performing dismally in terms of reading comprehension, mathematics, science and creative thinking. Among the marching orders reportedly issued by President Marcos to new Education Secretary Sonny Angara was to ensure that Filipinos would perform better in the next PISA.

Angara would need an enormous amount of resources for public education to carry out that order. The Constitution requires the largest chunk of the annual national budget to go to education. In reality, the biggest chunk goes to debt payments, although the education sector gets the largest appropriation within the executive branch.

The pandemic lockdowns worsened the education crisis. Today’s adjusted school opening is meant to be a major step in the return to the pre-pandemic academic calendar. The bigger challenge is to end the education crisis. Until about half a century ago, the Philippines was a regional destination for world-class education. Regaining that status should not be an impossible undertaking.