Sunday, August 15, 2004 Mercado: Those devalued diplomas By Juan L. Mercado
Is the diploma that parents display in their living rooms worth the parchment it’s printed on?
No, say five educators’ groups working under the umbrella of the Council of Private Educational Associations (Copea).
About 700,000 graduates–half of 1.4 million who got elementary school diplomas–flunked already drastically watered-down High School Readiness Test given last May, Copea notes. “This means majority of those enrolling in first year of public high schools know only 27 percent of what they were to have learned in elementary school.”
These students never broke out of semi-literacy’s twilight world. They enter a complex 21st century where only the educated land the jobs. So, who do we fool with devalued diplomas? “If we`re so smart, why ain’t we rich?” UNDP’s Terence Jones once asked.
Thus, come August 31, the education department launches a second round of high school readiness tests. Take the “bridge program,” those who fall will be “strongly advised.”
This is a rescue package. Reading comprehension of many graduates slumped lower than Grade 6. Results in mathematics and science are more dismal. Filipino students limped in number 38, out of 42 countries, in the International Mathematics and Science Examinations. (Singaporeans were first.)
But Malacañang is tepid about the program. In her State of the Nation Address, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo expressed preference for tacking on a year, before kids enroll in Grade One. She left it at that.
Private school students need not take the bridge program. That’s understandable. “The quality gap between private and public education stares one in the face,” Philippine Human Development Report (PHDR) notes.
Private high schools performed 20 percent better than their public counterparts, PHDR notes. The disparity, in fact, starts in elementary grades: there, the gap is already 27 per cent.
My granddaughter’s reading list underscores this sorry divide. Now in Grade 6, Camille is reading Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” She’s also leafing through “Animal Farm,” George Orwell’s allegory on dictatorship, plus the “Diary of Anne Frank”–the 14-year-old Jewish girl, who wrote while hiding in a cellar, until arrest and execution by the Gestapo. (I read Twain in high school, Orwell and Frank in college.)
In public schools, “tests show that barely any additional knowledge is gained between Grade 5 and Grade 6,” studies by scientists like Edita Tan, Ma. Luisa Doronila, Milagros Ibe and others reveal.
Many graduates are “semi-lingual”: barely able to communicate in either English or their language. They’re hard put to read, analyze or compute.
These are the fortunate: those who managed to stay in school. Of every 100 kids who enroll in public schools, 33 drop out before reaching Grade 6, mainly due to poverty.
“Scary” says an editor, of tomorrow’s adults who never heard, much less read, Jose Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, Horacio de la Costa’s readings in history or novels by the Tiempos or NVM Gonzales, Shakespeare or Tagore.
The program “corrects an oversight of 64 years,” Copea points out. The Education Reform Law of 1940 intended to establish a 12-year cycle of basic education. Fund shortages instead clipped elementary school from seven to six years. That seventh grade was never restored.
Today, most countries require 11 to 13 years of pre-university education. “Even the poorest countries in Asean, such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia support 11 years of education.”
Results of this truncated cycle have been disastrous. “Our first two college years in the
Philippines are often regarded as equivalent to only third and fourth year high schools in some institutions abroad,” Copea notes. “At present, the freshman curriculum, in most colleges, comes out as a remedial course on high school English, mathematics.”
Timing is important too. “It’s better to master the basics before moving on to more complex subjects in high school,” the educators stressed. “A pre-high school bridge is the best place to fix the gaps.
It also offers a “rare opportunity for public school students to become academically competitive” with these in private schools.
The program involves the same number of students entering secondary schools. Government already foots the bill. Incidental expenses for parents – from baon to pocket money--remain the same.
Parents see diplomas as a escape hatch. Through schooling, their children can break free from the penury their own lack of schooling handcuffed many of them to.
“He who can use a writing brush need never beg,” the Chinese say. That is validated by research. A study by UP School of Economics Arsenio Baliscan shows that “poverty incidence falls by three percent for every one percent improvement in literacy.”
But parents also sense this occurs only when real learning takes place, not when diplomas are
handed out to flunkers. Thus, a recent Social Weather Stations survey shows that 70 percent of parents back the bridge program.
Copea stresses that the bridge program “is not a panacea” but only a first welcome step. Other components–from teacher’s training, textbooks, schoolrooms – must be addressed.
The educated citizen is critical for a humane democratic society. “Education is the soul of a society,” GK Chesterton wrote, “as it passes from one generation to another.”
(e-mail: juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
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