Monday, October 08, 2007 Echaves: Culture of mediocrity By Lelani P. Echaves Thinking Aloud
THAT our good teachers, nurses and IT professionals are leaving for better pay abroad is a given.
Newly licensed nurses get only P7,000 a month from known hospitals hereabouts, smaller than clerks get in private companies. Adding salt to the nurses’ wounds is that some even get more than the government-mandated benefits, such as Christmas bonuses, and comprehensive loan availments like education, appliances, hospitalization for family members, calamities, and other emergencies.
Thus, working abroad continues to have alluring effects. It’s no wonder that despite the protestations against retaking the licensure exams because of the 2006 leakage, those who want to work abroad had to surrender to the mandate. That or their applications for US employment would end deathly still.
That’s because the benefits nurses reap from suffering the US expectation are tremendous and phenomenal, compared to Philippine offerings. The nurse getting P7,000 here can actually get at least P120,000 abroad. Some US employers in fact allow the nurses to bring their family, provide free accommodations for one whole year or six months until the family can move to their own quarters, and a guaranteed return visit to the Philippines after one-two years.
IT professionals, as a group, are not that privileged. A few with exemplary credentials and experience get lucrative offers. But for most, it’s a totally individualized thing. I’m told of one who’s leaving family and all for a job that pays P30,000 monthly. I think, however, that if one is really good in IT, he can get that amount even in Cebu.
For a brief period in the past, I tried inviting one such good professional to head the IT department of a particular school. Twice I offered, twice he declined. His monthly salary at a government agency was only P8,000. But his agency was lenient, and allowed him to moonlight with IT projects that swelled his monthly pay to about P40,000. He didn’t need to go abroad and leave his family.
The fellow built and strengthened his competence and skills through curiosity and an unending desire to know his craft and industry. True, he finished a four-year IT course but like other IT graduates, the lessons taught him were half-baked and the teaching, half-hearted. Cementing a culture of mediocrity, teachers would be a half hour late and students would spend their waiting time chatting and gossiping. Most often, classrooms are empty when teachers go no-show after 15 minutes.
My father’s assistant is an IT student at a downtown university. Yet, while she’s already in third year, she knows only Word and Excel, programs she could learn as short-term courses. How about Power Point? Yes, but her sheepish smile begs, “Please ask no further.”
Her semestral tuition fees amount to about P12,000. Working students know that’s not easy to put together. Thus on a value-for-money scale, I’d say she’s been gypped. Mediocre teachers should be banned from any school.
