Thursday, March 13, 2008 Editorial: Education in the trillion peso Philippine budget
EVERYTHING in the Philippines is connected to politics, the way we understood it. This is among the undying legacy of the American democracy. Usually, a legacy is something beautiful that builds a people. Not the American democracy, which was forced upon the Filipinos at a time when our psyche syncretized it in so many ways.
Nevertheless, consciously or unconsciously, the syncretized American politics in whatever way we understood it, encompassed the whole of our lives everything that the leadership does is tainted with it. This does not spare even a piece of accounting statement like the Philippine Budget.
Most notable is the one basic difference between the Spanish and American colonialist is science and education. While Spain forcibly introduce us to Catholicism, the Americans gently persuaded us to embrace the 'Great White Way' through the science of formal education.
This American formal education pervaded the Filipino political culture, it is as if we cannot survive without it. Is it a coincidence that again and again, education gets the biggest part of the budget pie but with nary a result in terms of quality.
Let us be fair, with more than 65 percent of the Philippine population is of the school-age bracket, the burden to educate is a reality.
It does not make sense, however, if we take a microscopic look at the education budget itself which is 95 percent personnel cost and the rest of the five percent are fought out by infrastructures and repairs.
The word 'education' is a byword in our political culture. Every politician talks about it. Many of them build schools with their family name on it.
The misallocation between personnel costs and other costs in the education budget, however, is something which no politician dare tread.
Yes, education gets the topmost priority. How noble if we set the American factor aside. The perpetuation of the budgetary misallocation, however, is politics definitely.
