MY ELDEST child would have already been in college. His graduation from senior high school never materialized because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, consider that the K-12 curriculum change already lengthened his stay in high school. He is asking us to decide whether he would totally skip school this year or not. Some members of his batch in science school have decided to do so.
There is no word yet from the science school where his brother would have already been attending junior high school classes. In ordinary times, this month would have been the time of the holding of the Brigada Eskwela in preparation for the opening of classes next month. President Duterte recently said he was not in favor of the resumption of classes if there is as yet no vaccine for the coronavirus.
I feel sorry for my sons. The eldest son and I went through the hassle of applying for a Department of Science and Technology (DOST) college scholarship. Now, word has spread that government scholarships can no longer be funded because government funds have been depleted by the government’s efforts against the Covid-19 pandemic.
This means that if the situation normalizes, family spending that is set to balloon because of the payments put on hold by the lockdown will be complicated in some families by school tuition. And a decision will have to be made whether to send their children to school this school year or not. It’s a sad situation my sons are in now.
But I worry too of the children who will be affected by the new normal we will be having. The idea many policymakers are pushing seems to be overlooking the children in poor families. The push for education using recent advances in technology does not favor them but it does, however, for the children of the moneyed. Even now, children of poor families do not own gadgets or are ignorant of them altogether.
Even the idea of having less children in a classroom because of physical distancing is difficult to implement because of the lack of classrooms especially in public schools. A case in point: the room that my young son and his classmates occupied last year was only one half of a regular classroom. The chairs were so close to each other that he regularly crossed elbows with the students to his left and right sides.
While my eldest may be able to skip a year of college education, I do not want the education of my son who is still in junior high school to be disrupted that long. That is why I am closely monitoring the moves of the Department of Education. I am hoping things will normalize early and that the so-called new normal won’t be that disruptive to the educational setup.
The basic education of my sons was shaped by a Catholic school. Since the start of the quarantine period, my wife has been leading us in nightly rosaries. My sons know the prayers better than me, and that is a product of the training done by the Recollect sisters. My wife includes the Oratio Imperata of the Cebu archdiocese on the pandemic in the ritual. It is time to include there a prayer that we survive the coming of the “new normal.”