Saturday, December 16, 2006 Oledan: Non-negotiable By Radzini Oledan Slice of Life
NO DOUBT of the remarkable progress on the effort geared towards educating the young. Investments have been poured by the private sector, foreign development assistance, and local government units. But while there is a lot of debate on access especially for disparity areas in the hinterlands, reality would that there is still a lot of way to go with respect to learning achievements, social inequality, and gender issues.
Not all children who enroll in school are able to complete and if they do, very few of them become functionally literate. In so many areas in the hinterland, it is not uncommon to come across children who have been to school but remain functionally illiterate.
Curriculum and pedagogic issues leave much to be desired.
The motivation and capability of teachers remain as problem areas. Above all, there are still a very large number of poor children-especially girls in rural areas-who do not have access to quality education.
The economic divide-particularly with respect to quality education is getting wider. Many systemic issues need to be addressed.
It is clear that government should shoulder the primary responsibility for basic education. However, the question on its capacity in terms of financial, managerial, and human resources to provide all the backward and forward linkages that would make meaningful education a reality for those who are left out of the system.
Even if physical access is ensured, are we assured of good quality education? Special programs of the government have tried to reach out but by and large it is obvious that the government does not have the capacity to work simultaneously on several fronts- access, quality and relevance.
The active participation of children in primary education pivots around a number of factors. Physical access is just one dimension. Children do not attend school regularly, and even if they do, they do not learn very much. It starts with systematic issues of access, dysfunctional schools, motivation and commitment of teachers and quality of schools.
Once children reach school, a variety of factors determine whether they will continue or drop out, whether and how much they will learn and whether they will acquire interest and the skills to pursue formal education.
In fact, the presence of enabling schemes and environment determine the continuity of children if they drop out due to poverty, migration, rigid gender roles or other economic factor.
The lack of roles model is another important factor for large drop out. The distance between home and school is also a factor for less participation of children in the school.
In our documentation of community initiatives, children in the hinterland areas would always narrate how they prefer to 'help' out their parents in the farms rather than walk the distance from their homes to school for four to five hours.
For these children and their families, rights are abstract as they grapple with the realities of day-to-day living. The continued disparity stems from the unequal access to, low quality and marginal relevance of basic education.
The obsession for universal access led to budget cuts that resulted to the deterioration of the quality education. This is evident in the low scores obtained by students in standard tests at the national and international levels.
The quality deficit is mainly attributed to the inadequate budget for education. The national education budget is only about four percent of the Gross National Product and investment per pupil is way below international standards.
In the absence of books and other learning materials, there is also a dearth of highly competent teachers.
Apart from quality, relevance remains a problem. Most of what children learn in school is not applicable in their daily lives. Curriculum is overloaded and does not accommodate regional and cultural differences, leading to lack of focus and rote memorization.
Language remains an issue. While there is an effort to indigenize knowledge through the use of Filipino as the medium of instruction, this is unsupported by qualified teachers and good teaching materials.
For all intent and purpose, there is a need to rationalize the education budget to fully address the issues of educational quality and relevance. There is also a need to make education more accountable to parents, communities and local governments. This will pave the way for common projects such as fund-raising for the improvement of school facilities, and development of quality and relevant curriculum which must also be gender and culturally sensitive.
Greater collaboration needs to be undertaken. More than the question of access, quality must also be the highlight of our public discourse.
