Philippines education sucks. I don't know, our government doesn’t place great importance on education. This, in consequence, is no negligible issue. Equality rests or collapses with us and our habits of mind, and education produces habits of mentality. We, even so, are seeing deep-seated changes equally in pedagogy and curricular content, and these changes have not been well thought throughout. Keen for cost-effective intensification, this nation, like many others, has begun to think of education in barely instrumental terms, as a set of practical skills that can create quick-fix turnover for business (of other countries, perhaps). What is getting misplaced in the cutthroat outbreak is the opportunity of social equality.
We, as citizens, need to tend the ability to pass judgement on practice and authority, to keep examining self and other, to accept no talking or suggestion until we have tested it with our very own way of thinking. We have a disquieting capability to defer to authority and to peer pressure. Social equality can’t go on if we don’t limit these baneful tendencies, cultivating habits of intrusive and critical thought.
We also could do with historical knowledge, the basics of the major world religions, and how the global economy works. We need to learn to weigh up evidence, to think for ourselves about the unusual ways in which it can be put together, and brought to bear on current reality.
The humanities, the arts, and even history are being cut away to make room for profit-making skills (or merely profit-making by schools). When such changes are made, business itself suffers, because healthy business cultures necessitate ingenuity and critical thinking, as leading business educationists have long stressed. Even were this not factual, however, the liberal arts are essential for the sort of government we have chosen and for the sort of the Philippines we have long sought to be.
The role of education is extensively understood to be essential in our society for both the encroachment of the nation over and above the enhancement of individual life. The power that results from learning provides people with the ability to do well physically, rationally, and psychologically, and contribute their resources to the betterment of their environment. The fact that a person who has worked hard at his or her education will be offered countless opportunities for his or her future is something that no one can contest in our culture, because it is based on a philosophy that has fueled the growth of our country. But it seems that only a small number are working hard.
The Philippines has need of public education in the hope that everyone would be offered an equal opportunity to realise this dream and to pursue a life full of goings-on and dispensation. Yet, when it comes down to it, this presumption has failed to provide each student with the same opportunity to accomplish his or her goal and instead has only fostered isolation, bigotry, and mass disproportion.
The biggest problem in our public educational system is the relentless lack of financial support and the gross inequalities that are present amongst schools. While many children of middle and upper class neighbourhoods are given the material and intellectual resources that will allow them to get hold of high social standing, solid employment, and wealth, many other children are denied this dispensation because of their economic background and location. Observably within almost any society there are going to be varying levels of material goods and power, but it seems that in the Philippines, the dissimilarity between rich and poor is greatly puffed up. How is it that low-income populace are not being offered the same resources as superior class citizens? It is this lack of fiscal resources in poor neighbourhoods that is the foundation of all the other problems found in the individual district schools. Unproductive and inexpert teachers, textbooks, lab instruments, and general supply insufficiency, and inapt building conditions all stem from the fact that there is not enough money being put into such institutions. However, because of both societies’ approach towards the low-income class and personal greed, this fiscal disproportion is not going to change; political power, and public unresponsiveness also contribute to the overall lack of knowledge of the problem.
The educational system is an institution that is not only an integral piece of our social structure but also is responsible for teaching children the fundamental learning tools, simple values, and social skills that are essential for continued existence in our culture. The facility to read, write, solve problems, and understand numbers is essential for almost any job, and knowing how to interact with others in a social context or in the workplace and respect authority (as in a employer-employee bond) is vital if one intends to work or even live in our world nowadays, and these are all things that are taught in school, through positive student-teacher interactions and class coursework. The perspective on how a society stays together is based on the idea of a set of agreed upon norms, beliefs, values, and expectations of appropriate behaviour that is to be internalised by each individual. Consequently, if education serves the purpose of instilling this harmony, when all the public school students are not held to the same set of standards, there is going to be a mainstream of the population that will not be capable to fulfil a task in our society, and thus accordingly will become a strain on the other parts of society as a whole. A malfunction of one part of society that interferes with the smooth functioning of the whole, is a social problem, and then, the movement towards testing and answerability is trying to lighten the pressure that our current system has upon institutions like the economy and family structure.
The biggest problem, in terms of what the primary issue in education is today is the lack of funding that occurs in schools all over the country, as well as the fact that the massive disparity, so clearly perceptible within our system, receives such little attention from the public and accordingly remains up in the air. Reading about the wretched building conditions, the lack of proper educational resources, and the inefficiency of the teachers was to me such an unknown and sickening impression, because I have led a life full of unbinding freedom; that these kind of situations and circumstances exist in such alarming numbers is, in my opinion, totally undesirable and immensely duplicitous of our country. It would not take much money from each individual to restore schools and perhaps even whole neighbourhoods; and the fact that personal greed plays such a huge role in the withholding of monetary support is disgusting of us as humans. The fact that in the Philippines, there are children crammed into decrepit classrooms with uninspiring teachers, no books, no hope for a better future, and little solace from the harsh realities of life is a self-mockery.
On university education, our government is handing over millions of pesos to incompetent professors in state universities. Incompetent university professors are good for nothing. The Philippines has no framework of higher education that can match up to the rest of the world. The universities are a quagmire of despotic professors. The PhDs can not function in the real world. There is no standard of research in the country in hard sciences or social sciences. Knowledge is passed by rote and memorisation in a continual loop from teacher to student to teacher. Teachers do not undertake or tolerate critical thinking. Any old place can slap a university sign on the door and become an accredited institution to meet the criteria for government financial backing.
I think our educationists and politicians should require all graduate applicants to take the GRE, set up tenure review and administrative review, push student unions on campus, strengthen cultural and social discourse and, most beguilingly, exert a pull on Filipino teachers.
Our education should give us a sense of place, instil in us much self-confidence and self-worth, and give us the power to do something good with our life. Does it? The notion that there are thousands of students just that are being shorn of this opportunity because of either their economic status is nauseatingly inequitable in my eyes. I sense that the more pressing issue lies in the already present dreadful circumstances in which a lot of poor students are being taught, especially because it is a problem much easier to tackle and would have such discernible and perceptible results. It is unmistakable that with apposite fiscal organisation and support that this problem of inequity could be easily solved, and would in turn help assuage the burdens of many other issues that come to pass within hard-up neighbourhoods about the country. Teenage pregnancy, drug use, and other problems still would turn into many families all but dysfunctional. The family, though, differs from the school in the considerable respect that government is not conscientious, at least not directly, for the inequalities of family background. It is responsible for inequalities in education. Schools, on the other hand, could make striking changes almost overnight if fiscal equity was a reality. I blame our government for not taking the fitting actions to resolve the situation. It cannot be disregarded that in each social system there are going to be people better off than others, but it is the job of each citizen and each elected official to make certain that every single person is in any case given the prospect by any means possible to make it.
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