Classroom fetish

When an earthquake or a flood forces schools to call classes, the first thing administrators and education officials think about is, when can we have make-up classes? In fact, even without disasters, when a teacher misses class for some reason, the department chair or principal immediately asks about make-up classes.

My question is, why?

Why this assumption that students have to be in a classroom to have class? Why should the quality of education be measured by the number of hours a student stays inside a classroom? What is so magical or important about 80 hours (for basic education) or 54 hours (for the usual college subject)?

The question occupied my mind during the discussion sponsored by the Magsaysay Transformative Leadership Institute last Saturday, March 1, at the Ramon Magsaysay Center in Manila. Present during the discussion were the pair I consider the best secondary school educators in the country today – the Ramon Magsaysay laureates Christopher and Ma. Victoria Bernido – as well as some of the country’s most popular bloggers.

The discussion focused on “Inclusive Education and Cultural Development,” with special emphasis on “ensuring that all learners have access to quality education that meets basic learning needs, respects diversity, and enriches their lives.” As expected in discussions where everybody has something to say, talk covered more than the announced topic.

I liked Christopher Bernido’s assessment of the educational situation. He dismissed familiar problems such as lack of textbooks, lack of teachers, and the bureaucratic outlook of most government authorities by citing the revolution going on in other parts of the world.

“Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs,” he pointed out, “are changing the landscape of education. Soon, Philippine education will be radically altered by MOOCs.”

I could not agree more. I have long advocated the use of MOOCs, primarily because, despite the presence of some geniuses in our educational system, we cannot really say that any of our schools are better than Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and other universities that now allow anyone in the world to listen to the lectures of their professors for free.

I also liked particularly the comment by Ma. Victoria Bernido that, in their school in Bohol, no student is called or considered “bulok” (dumb). Everybody is intelligent or can become intelligent, and the best proof that they are right is the continuing, amazing phenomenon of students in their remote municipality of Jagna passing the UPCAT and other college entrance examinations.

The Bernidos work with all types of students, not only smart ones. It is not remarkable that smart students end up in college, but it is extremely remarkable that students considered far from smart (I should not say “bulok” or “bobo”) qualify for UP as well.

The young bloggers had their own smart ideas as well. One suggested that teachers should pay equal attention to all students, no matter what their presumed intelligence is. One suggested that teachers should be paid a lot more, so that they would be free from the financial pressure that forces many of them to have sidelines. One suggested (and I agree) that DepEd and CHED should not require students to stay for a specified percentage of class hours inside a classroom.

We are always asking about whether there are enough classrooms for students, or about how many students are in a classroom (called classroom size or teacher-student ratio, something even international rating agencies consider as important). The Bernidos have shown that quality education can occur in overcrowded classrooms with only one teacher handling three classrooms simultaneously.

In fact, when pressed by me, the Bernidos had to admit that, indeed, the teachers were not needed at all. All that is really needed is for someone to maintain discipline or keep everybody quiet, but even that is not so necessary if there is what is known in education as “constructive noise.” If students were busy arguing at the top of their voices who is a better poet, Shakespeare or Villa, why should a teacher stop them?

When I am asked about the current educational reforms (in number of years in school, in medium of instruction, in teaching methods, and so on), I always answer that we should learn from our own experience. We have been teaching millions of Filipino students since the end of the 19th century. We have tried all sorts of teaching strategies for more than a hundred years. Yet we all agree that our educational system is a mess, with the country scoring so badly in international exams that we sometimes do not even dare participate.

Surely, it is time to try something else, something we have not tried before. The Dynamic Learning Program of the Bernidos is something new. We should try it not only because it is new, but because it works.

There are, of course, all kinds of other new ideas, actually implied in their program.

One is dropping the idea that there should be a teacher in every classroom. Another is doing away with the physical classroom itself. Another (and this is now being tried in the UK) is dropping teachers altogether.

It is time to drop our classroom fetish. There are better ways to educate children than to put them into a classroom that is as constrictive as a prison cell.