I was four years old when I started attending classes in school. It was nothing serious. I was too young at the time to be admitted to kindergarten, but I remember wanting to be treated like the older students hanging around at our residence after school. It was only a stretch of narrow street that separated one of the school’s entrances from our house door. Those older students liked my mother, who was very kind to them. My mother arranged for me to be accommodated in the grade four class where those students belonged. That class was assigned to my godfather’s aunt, Ma’am Mico, an intelligent teacher who remained genuinely fond of me until she died of old age when I was in college. <
The Philippine education history shows no record of widespread shortage of classrooms during that period. But I remember clearly seeing some students in front of our house carrying their chairs to class. Everyday. If that was a common sight in other parts of the country, it was not considered an issue worth discussing in the media. Perhaps, it was understandable in those days for the country’s education system to be in a state where some children had to carry their chairs to school, or anything similar, in areas far from the immediate reach of “Imperial Manila.”
Decades have passed since my early school days, and yet the Philippine education system remains in a dire state. If it’s not worse now, then it’s certainly not better. The urgency of this situation cannot be overstated.
Philippine Statistics Authority, through the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (2024 FLEMMS), reported 18.9 million 2024 finishers of junior and senior high school in the Philippines were found to be functionally illiterate, meaning they could barely understand what they read, unless, probably, these are just sight words. Citing the same survey, Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said at the senate hearing on 30 April over 24 million Filipinos, aged 10 to 64, are functionally illiterate, and 5.8 million more were found to be illiterate or could neither read nor write. There’s another problem. Early this year, the PIDS (Philippine Institute for Development Studies) reported that the government needs to construct 165,000 more classrooms.
This isn’t good for the leadership image of all the national administrators who have worked since we started exerting conscious effort to elevate the quality of Philippine education. After all those decades of searching for ways to enable students to wriggle themselves out from the old straitjacket of poor academic performance, the education system should already have found some potent solutions to the problems it has been seeking to address effectively.
It’s no longer excessive to expect that the country should have picked up some learning speed at the basic education level. It should have started to climb significantly beyond the level of other third-world countries known embarrassingly for being perpetually at the tail end of international academic races like the TIMSS and the PISA. Yes, they are a competition. They can’t be so, only if we are part of or close to joining the lead pack, and not so when we remain a donkey in a horse race.
Who should bear the responsibility for the functional illiteracy of the 18.9 million new high school graduates? This is a question that demands an answer.
Note a big chunk of this population segment will already cast their votes on the May 12 election of 12 senators, 254 district representatives, and other local government officials?
Rep. Roman Romulo, without a hint of doubt, said this is the education system’s fault. Isn’t this a recklessly face-saving answer to the question of who is liable for the continued educational failure in view?
Highly competent teachers are a necessary part of any education system that aims to turn out functionally literate basic education graduates. To populate every school in the Philippines with educators who possess above-average teaching aptitude, it is necessary to make the teacher’s salary enticing enough for high-ability graduating senior high school students. Let’s take things in perspective. Why would they consider pursuing a career in teaching in the Philippines if it means living a hard life before and after their retirement age?
Shaming or blaming teachers to convince them to work harder toward and pull their teaching aptitudes beyond their limits is like asking them to keep filling the bucket with water beyond its capacity. Making them feel guilty about their perceived shortcomings may help to a certain extent, but it may not be as effective if they are the ones who simply settled for the teaching profession because they didn’t have the aptitude to pursue a career in STEM or law. Soon enough they will reach their low-level fizzle-out point. Asking them to leave the teaching profession if they can’t shape up will not work either unless you have a large army of high-ability education graduates waiting to replace them and commit to enduring the hardships of being a schoolteacher in the Philippines.
Pep-talking all teachers, regardless of their pedagogical abilities, into staying loyal to Filipino education is the most futile tactic now, a sentiment only echoed by politicians who seem unaware of how teachers, the soldiers on the ground, truly perceive them. Convincing them that teaching in the country is the noblest calling or vocation is already a worn-out, butt-naked, nearly empty, condescending, and deceptive talk. For If it is true, why are the politicians not yet queuing to become schoolteachers themselves in the Philippines? Suppose they’d say they do not have the capacity to teach. In that case, perhaps, they should not be running a public office, whose general function necessarily includes informing, instructing, planning, enlightening, and, therefore, teaching their constituents.
Politicians who are quick to blame the education system but themselves regarding the sad plight of millions of Filipino public schoolchildren should try teaching in the barrios or underserved schools. Trade places, including salaries, with the teachers even for just a month.
The politicians will do all the paperwork required of public schoolteachers. The politicians will make lesson plans and execute them for children with varying learning needs. They will make on-site adjustments because students come from diverse cultural backgrounds and have different a priori knowledge. They have different levels of family incomes, family setups, religions, languages, worldviews, and whatnot. The politicians must faithfully heed the principles of inclusion, diversity, spiral progression, differentiated teaching, student-centered learning, and other virtues of principled teaching. This is to ensure that all the students will come out, after four weeks of teaching, significantly better than the persons they were on the first day of their meeting with the politicians, who think that today’s public schoolteachers, having an important role to play in Philippine education, are part of the entity that is mainly, if not solely, liable for the functional illiteracy of close to 30 million Filipinos.
Make no mistake. Finland, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and other consistently top-ranking countries in the PISA and the TIMSS have good teachers, not because many of their high-ability high school graduates had been hoodwinked into thinking that they are doing great, even if their profession is a low-paying calling or vocation. Teachers in these countries, run by competent leaders and better politicians, regard the teaching profession with utmost respect. So, they created a system where the teaching profession is matched with a well-deserved salary. They truly believe that high-quality basic education is a serious foundation of good citizenship. This is why a scary, strong force of millions of thoughtless voters in those countries is unimaginable.
The persistent failure of Philippine education shows that politicians and leaders do not truly care about the crucial place of high teaching aptitude in developing a functionally literate population. They are the ones who have the resources at their disposal to find potent ways to make teachers’ salaries in the Philippines attractive to high-achieving high school graduates, yet they failed. They should humbly accept responsibility and stop lamenting the matter with crocodile tears.
Shaming the education system and pep-talking the teachers like they are gullible little children won’t work. If it ever does, perhaps, when the last of us or all of us are already dead. Stop it. Please.
The main problem is leadership above the level of the educational system.
