TODAY marks the 40th death anniversary of John Lennon. There were signs that, in 1980, Lennon could have been embarking on a second wave of creativity. This made his murder all the more tragic. We shall never know what we missed.
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I salute the Department of Education (DepEd). Despite the fact that the Philippines regularly ranks poorly in international comparisons of educational attainment, DepEd is prepared to take part. The latest results were conducted by the United Nations in February 2019 on reading, writing, and mathematical literacy of Grade 5 students in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Vietnam and Malaysia, in particular, showed that their students had acquired far greater educational achievements than their counterparts in the Philippines.
In a previous study conducted by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018, the Philippines ranked 78th out of 79 countries which took part.
In this study, conducted for 15 year old students, the result showed that Filipino learners found it difficult to answer questions that required integrating and generating inferences. This may be compatible with my own hypothesis that students seem to be taught to learn by rote instead of learning by understanding. If we really understand something, we should be able to remember it for a long time.
DepEd insists that it is making progress in its campaign for quality education. Four areas are identified as requiring improvement.
These are:
* K-12 curriculum review and update
* Improving the learning environment
* Teachersā upskilling and reskilling
* Engagement of stakeholders for support and collaboration.
What is needed is a genuine dialogue between educators and āstakeholdersā (which I suppose means the rest of us).
The process leading up to the passage of RA10533, the āK-12ā Act did not have a meaningful dialogue. DepEd adopted a superior āwe know bestā tone and ignored nearly all stakeholders. Decision-makers should be prepared to scrap RA10533 altogether. We need a pragmatic system which enables competent students to reach the tertiary education level much more quickly than the 13 years of mediocre time-wasting that has embodied our education system since 2012.
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Education under COVID-19 has, of course, taken a worldwide hit.
A UN study has found that around 1.3 billion students affected by school closures are unable to log onto the internet at home.
In the Philippines, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has bemoaned the reluctance of the private sector to take out loans. I respectfully recommend that BSP should do more to pressure banks to reduce the excessive margins between the lending rate (on average under 1 percent) from customers to the extremely high interest rates charged by banks to their borrowers.
BSP has called on the government to accelerate its spending program. I believe this could be done in part by ensuring that all homes with school-age children have internet facilities. Those homes which do not have the internet, but would like to, should be offered interest- free bank loans. Interest charges should be negotiated between the banks and DepEd which should shoulder the interest payments. The households would be responsible for the telecommunications costs and to the banks for paying off the loans.
Radical? Yes!
Implementable? Yes, though it requires banks to change their attitudes towards the less well-heeled./PN
