The inexorable slide to mediocrity
Credit to Author: Marlen V. Ronquillo| Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2019 17:09:46 +0000
The depressing report of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) — that our 15-year-old students are the second most mediocre in the world in English, math and science — came at the same time Sundar Pichai was named the head of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which had a market cap of $818.16 billion as of the first quarter of 2019.
If you have a little of two things — discernment and love of country — you will sink from mere depression into impossible depression. Our 15-year-old students have very little hope of moving up into the world, getting productive lives and getting equipped with ample civic virtue (so that they can vote wisely). Sundar Pichai from India, a chaotic, contentious democracy like ours, now leads one of the largest global conglomerates.
Why is Pichai, born in Tamil Nadu, which has areas deep in poverty like the poverty-stricken areas of Mindanao, a global leader? And why are our 15-year-old students hopeless cases? Even if they migrate to the US, our young will most likely end up as bus drivers and staff of the food catering services at the many Alphabet campuses in the Bay Area.
The answer? Education. India’s obsession with educating its young. The obsession of India’s young men and women to beat poverty via excelling at education and winning all the top professional jobs in technology and finance, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. The single-minded pursuit to excel.
It was not even a technocrat who had the vision of preparing India’s young for world-conquering professional achievements. It was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India and an unapologetic socialist. The seminal idea to build a tertiary, public institution that would train world-class scientists, engineers and mathematicians came from Nehru, during the first few years of the difficult transition from a colony to a democracy.
The result? The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which trained Pichai at one of the many IIT campuses spread across the densely populated areas of India. Which trained Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Nikesh Arora, the vice chairman of SoftBank; former International Monetary Fund chief economist Raghuram Rajan; and many globally famous overachievers.
India — chaotic, contentious and political polarized like the Philippines — has produced global movers and shakers. The Philippines, in contrast, has a vast pool of 15-year-olds that are most probably candidate for extrajudicial killing.
The difference is focus on education. Obsession with education. The state’s laser-like focus on training its young.
In the Philippines, no one from the official State would get bothered by the most damning report that exposes the country’s slide to mind-boggling mediocrity. No one is even asking this question. What is to be done?
The answer to reverse the mediocrity was the key phrase in one of the most impressive congressional inquiries done by the 8th Congress, the first Congress post-martial law. We don’t even have to look far. There is a one-sentence summary of the findings of the EdCom or the Congressional Commission on Education, which did the pioneering work of looking into the many woes and ills and weak links of Philippine education. It said: reverse the underspending.
Despite the constitutional provision that makes education the priority program of government, the EdCom found out that the leaks and holes and gaps of Philippine education were across the board: classrooms, textbooks and related educational instructions, libraries, laboratories and all the physical requirements required to improve lagging educational standards.
The teachers were underpaid and their heroic service to the country was unrecognized and barely compensated.
One of the worst drop-out rates in the global educational system belonged to the Philippines, according to the report. Worse, a report from the nutrition groups exposed that there was another reason for the embarrassing drop-out rate other than the mediocre educational system — from 8 to 10 million children of school age were found malnourished. Imagine the toxic combination of a mediocre educational system and wasted children in that mediocre system.
The PISA just reiterated the gist of the EdCom report.
It said of the 79 countries surveyed, the Philippines had the lowest education spending.
Nothing has changed since that landmark congressional report done in the 20th century yet.
And what are the priorities set in the 2020 budget?
The Department of Education made two basic requests to fill in two gaps, classrooms and teachers. It asked for funds to build more than 64,000 classrooms and hire 43,000 new public school teachers. That did they get in the 2020 budget? Pittance is an understatement.
Recently, I wrote a piece about a “country that can’t even build classrooms.” What was funded in the budget would make educators weep: funds for only 10,000 classrooms and 10,000 new teachers. The budget for higher education is also 22 percent lower than the 2019 level.
Health and nutrition are also low priorities in the 2020 budget.
What gets priority? “Pork barrel,” according to Sen. Ping Lacson.
Billions of pesos parked in some budgetary catacombs for some dubious construction projects.
No wonder the slide to mediocrity is both inexorable and irreversible.