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Thursday, February 26, 2004
Better education sought to make RP competitive
By Cherry T. Lim
THERE may be more English speakers in the Philippines than in England, but Filipinos still need a lot of brushing up to do on their language skills and other educational faculties.
This is why there is now an initiative to give students access to education that is affordable and internationally benchmarked so they can become entrepreneurial and globally competitive.
“We take pride in sending OFWs” abroad, who together remit close to $8 billion yearly to the Philippines, but recent graduates lack the knowledge, skills and values to be globally competitive, said Roberto Aboitiz, trustee of the Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP).
During the 16th Visayas annual membership meeting of the PBSP last Friday at City Sports Club Cebu, Aboitiz explained that these overseas Filipino workers were mostly capable of working up to the supervisory level only, and not higher.
Here at home, only four out of 100 applicants land jobs in call centers “because we don’t meet the standards of spoken English demanded by the international market,” he added.
Drop out
Aboitiz said there was also no glory in the statistics showing that the elementary participation rate had risen to 97 percent from 85 percent over a 10-year period, as majority of these elementary school students dropped out before reaching high school.
The PBSP official then gave still more dismal figures on the state of Philippine education, saying the teacher to student ratio was 1:65, there were four students for every desk, and five students for every book.
And this is the result of the Philippines spending just P5,500 per student per year for elementary and high school.
This amount is one-sixth of what Thailand spends, and a tenth of what Singapore spends. The United States spends P200,000 while the world average is P40,000.
“The fact is that 90 percent of the DepEd (Department of Education) budget is for teachers’ salaries,” he said, which means very little is left to spend on equipment and facilities.
The Coalition for Better Education (CBE) plans to change this.
Integrate
Aboitiz, ex-officio mem-ber of CBE and trustee of the PBSP, said CBE hopes to integrate all the efforts undertaken by various foundations to improve the quality of education in the country.
Convened in 2001, CBE aims to improve the curricula, enhance academe-industry-government linkage to increase the employability of graduates, advocate educational reforms and develop competent teachers.
It now has 102 members and two main initiatives, the Center for Teacher Excellence (Ceftex) and iN.Cube.
Ceftex, a joint project of CBE, Cebu Normal University, City Savings Bank and Innove Communications, is a state-of-the-art teacher training facility that aims to address the problem of the low passing percentage at the teachers’ licensure exams.
On the other hand, iN.Cube is an initiative to involve communities to raise academic standards, reduce resource gaps and re-engineer structures and systems.
Classrooms
The aim is to increase the number of classrooms by 20 percent, and improve the desk ratio to 1:2 and the book to student ratio to 1:1.
PBSP is the largest corporate-led, non-profit social development foundation in the country. It has 183 members, of which 30 are in the Visayas.
(February 26, 2004 issue)
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