Education is an indispensable requirement for a person’s well-being. Insufficient or poor education deprives a person of the means of doing and becoming.
The Philippines has always taken in pride in its achievements in education, particularly its high adult literacy rate and high enrollment rate. Ironically, such high achievements in education are not translated into higher levels of development. The disparity stems from the unequal access to low quality and marginal relevance of basic education in the Philippines.
Improving access to education has always been the focus of government’s policy interventions, to the exclusion of other concerns. The government is hard pressed to keep up with the rapid growth of the country’s school-age population, and the high public elementary and secondary enrollment rates. The concern for universal access required budget cut that led to the deterioration of the quality education.
Poor quality of education is evident in the low scores obtained by Filipino students in standard tests at the national and international levels. Results of the nationally-administered National Elementary Achievement Test and National Secondary Achievement Test showed that students gave correct answers to less than 50 percent of the questions.
Also contributing to the low quality of education is the dearth of highly competent teachers who are the students’ primary source of learning in the absence of books and other learning materials.
Apart from quality, relevance is also problem in Philippine education. Most of what children learn in school is not applicable in their daily lives. Curriculum is overloaded and does not accommodate regional and cultural differences, leading to lack of focus and rote memorization. Language remains an issue. While the government has made an effort to indigenize knowledge through the use of Filipino as the medium of instruction, this is unsupported by qualified teachers and good teaching materials. Coupled with the deteriorating quality of English teaching, the situation has resulted in semilingualism and mediocrity.
Greater collaboration must be undertaken by the DEPED and local authorities on technical academic reforms, particularly those pertaining to the curriculum and policy on language instruction.
By: Ma. Luisa S. Rubiano | Teacher I | Calaguiman Elem. School | Samal, Bataan
