A 2019 study has revealed that 90 percent of Grade 5 students are unable to read at their expected level, and 83 percent continue to struggle with basic math skills. The Department of Education’s (DepEd) response is to tout programs to improve the reading and math skills of basic education students.
DepEd might be badly missing something here. Senators, congressmen, national, provincial and local executives and officials are all adept at reading. They also know their math. But lacking a sense of values, they read the budget and add insertions from which they subtract what they divide with favored contractors, thus multiplying their already high annual compensation. They can read laws but are skilled in violating them with impunity.
My point is that our basic education’s core problem is not lack of reading and math skills, although that too. It’s not the bleak results of international reading and math tests that should propel us into reforming our basic education system but the corruption, greed, injustice and insensitivity of its products in government and in big business. At the moment, highly educated (?) officials and businessmen are wracking their brains for ways to hide the ill-gotten wealth they have been so shamelessly flaunting to the Filipino people until the dam broke.
Basic education should grow children into adult human beings who care for fellow humans, for other creatures and for the earth itself. What is the use of teaching kids to read when as adults they ignore no jaywalking and no littering signs? Of what use is teaching them math skills, when later as adults they use these skills to steal from government and cheat fellow Filipinos.
If we teach the young ones skills alone, their subconscious will think human values do not matter in life, only the skills needed to succeed in the chaotic atmosphere of Philippine society, where cheating and stealing are normal ways of attaining financial success.
We should be opening our youth’s minds to innovative but moral ways of coping with life’s problems. To do this, they need to be taught empathy and integrity. Not lack of skills but lack of meaning and purpose makes people dishonest and irresponsible towards others. Children need to be taught early to value and respect others for who they are, fellow humans, and not for how they look or for what they have. As Kant tells us, humans are ends in themselves, not means to be used for other people’s ends.
But first, basic education must be available to all Filipino children. There’s no need for the DepEd secretary’s call for an all-sector effort to solve classroom shortage. The government has to simply make universal education a priority. It can build enough classrooms, hire enough teachers, train and compensate them properly, all with funds that it now wastes on expensive military hardware and on ghost government projects.
Empathy and integrity should take priority over skills in basic education. Skills are easy to acquire when children are taught early in life what it means to be truly and fully human. The last thing this country needs is skilled and literate lowlife forms richly disguised as humans.