Vote for an Education President

Again and again, we have been told that the coming elections are crucial to the survival of our country. That may very well be true for the economy, for governance, for human rights, and for all the other issues that we voters have to worry about when we go to the polls to elect the new national and local officials.

Fortunately for education, the coming elections are not that crucial. Presidents have come and gone, but Philippine education has shown remarkable resilience. Sad to say, of course, that is negative rather than positive. Despite all the efforts of all the past presidents, we still lag behind practically every other country in the world in various international rankings of educational systems (TIMSS, THES, ISI, and so on).

It is not just embarrassing, but outright disgraceful, that we have scored, at best, fifth from the bottom in TIMSS exams and once even landed rock bottom. Our best universities barely make it to any list of internationally-rated institutions; that only a handful out of more than 2,000 tertiary-level schools are respected outside the country is clearly cause for desperation.

Can the next President really make a difference when it comes to our educational system?

As in everything else, we always hope that a good leader will do something miraculous to suddenly cure a disease that has been lingering for decades. The reality, however, is that there is no miracle cure.

There is no quick fix to the sad state of education in our country. Adding two years to the basic education cycle, rationalizing the medium of instruction, or changing the curriculum needs at least 12 years to be fully implemented, since reforms have to start from pre-school and work themselves up the educational scale.

Finding a practical way to educate a fast-growing population without spending a lot of money to build classrooms, hire teachers, or buy instructional materials will take even longer, because education planners not only have to formulate a new philosophy of teaching and learning, but also to change the mindset of government officials, school administrators, teachers, parents, and students.

We are not alone in hoping that we can do things quickly with education and then getting disappointed. The Bologna Accord was supposed to be in full swing this year, but some European countries are clearly not going to meet that deadline. UNESCO’s deadline for everybody on the planet getting educated is 2015, and that seems like a pipe dream at this point.

But change can happen. If we look back at our history, we can see that the shift from a European educational system with Spanish as the medium of instruction to an American system using English took only a generation.

In fact, nobody now remembers what it was like to be in UST or Ateneo at the turn of the 20th century during those days when teachers and students had to use a new language, adopt a new way of teaching and learning, and work towards new degrees. Even those who remember having to take Spanish in high school (I had Spanish for all four years) are now quite old and usually unwilling and unable to accept any teaching philosophy younger than they are.

The change has to happen first inside our minds. We have to start realizing that we have had a century experimenting with ten years of basic education, college as a prerequisite for getting a good job, English as a medium of instruction, and cement-and-galvanized-iron classrooms. One century is surely long enough to know for sure that things just do not work and have to change drastically. It is time to change our philosophy of education. It is time to think outside the box.

Because I have been in education all my adult life (even not counting all my years as a child in school), I think that it is not just the President that is crucial to educational change. I think that equally important is a group of leaders that includes the DepEd Secretary, the CHED Chair, the TESDA Director General, the heads of other agencies supervising educational institutions (DOST, DSWD, CCP, UP, some SUCs), and the PA for Education. It would be ideal if there were one Education Czar that had line authority over all of these individuals, but that is asking for the moon (or an Education Lee Kuan Yew). More realistically, weekly meetings by everyone concerned (not just their undersecretaries or representatives) will do wonders for building what we now like to call our education highway.

Unless we do get an Education Czar, only the new President can chair such a meeting. That is the reason we have to elect an Education President who is himself educated, who has clear leadership qualities, who can appoint Education leaders other than his friends and supporters, and who will spend his time on education more than on the economy, governance, human rights, and all the other issues that are, of course, also crucial to the survival of the country.