Recently published in Planet Philippines.
I am a teacher at one of our country’s top science high schools. Suffice to say a lot is expected from us since everything from teacher salaries to student scholarships are funded by taxpayer money. Many take our entrance exams every year in the hope of adding their years with us to their curriculum vitae. We have a reputation for killing our students’ social lives as they devote four of their precious teenage years to rigorous, college-level study.
A product of our government’s initiative to remain at pace with the scientific and technological advancements during the 70’s, our school continues to produce winners in contests both here and abroad despite an increasingly clear lack of funds and the disturbingly confused priorities from government. Our objective to form future innovators is clear, but our classrooms, laboratories, and auditoriums are not as cutting edge as we would want them to be. And our scholars, under contract to pursue a science or mathematics course after college, live through the conflict of earning the prestige of becoming our graduate and then struggling to form careers out of the higher sciences they have learned. Our school may have responded to the space-race era of the Cold War, but are we preparing our students to succeed in the 21st century?
This is a question that faces not only our school, but confronts the entire Philippine public education system. Looking once more towards the beginning of a new school year, I reaffirm two things. First, I am proud of the work I do as a teacher. I have seen firsthand how it has fallen on individuals – teachers, parents, and students – to spur innovation and progress despite backward infrastructures and monolithic bureaucracies. And yet, I also realize that the problems with our education system are so fundamental that the feasibility and sustainability of any efforts to innovate are inherently challenged.
For instance, e-learning initiatives will not be sustainable without the adequate computer systems and infrastructure in place. Ensuring the global competitiveness of our students does not begin with standardized tests, but with making teaching global and competitive profession in its own right. Casting education as one solution to poverty will never gain traction if schools are not empowered to make a difference in their own communities.
I am not alone in recognizing this. Last May 18, the Education Nation was launched during a forum at the University of the Philippines. It is propelled by education stakeholders that cut across sectors and interests – business, government, civil society and the academe are all one in pushing for education to be a key issue in the upcoming 2010 national elections.
Their advocacy consists of two parts: establishing standards against which they can assess candidates’ positions on education, and engaging the president-elect to ensure that education remains a top priority during his or her administration. They are apolitical only in the sense that they will not endorse any candidate, but how far they go into bringing education to the forefront remains a matter of how well they lobby their cause.
They are inspired to action by seeing the same problems we do. Ramon del Rosario Jr., the chair of Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) and Education Now member, shared the following observations during the UP forum: Many children continue to have no classrooms, textbooks and qualified teachers, yet the government wants to use P24.6 billion to finance a cyber education project. Schools, principals and teachers were always complaining of lack of funds for training, while large pools of funds for technical assistance from donor agencies were largely left untapped. Malacañang executive orders and bills in Congress insisted on English or Filipino as medium of instruction, while local and global research showed that mother tongue instruction in the early years was the best way to help Filipino children learn. Effective, school-based nutrition programs were being replaced by rice distribution or “enriched noodle” feeding that were proven ineffective and corruption-prone. And so on.
The problems are so familiar to us that his observations almost sound cliché if it weren’t so alarming that these have been the problems in Philippine public education for decades. The problems are so dishearteningly fundamental – infrastructure, bureaucracy – that it seems as if we are still picking up the pieces from the Second World War. In asking whether we are ready for the 21st century, it appears as if I am the one with confused priorities; yet, we very well know that we can no longer shirk from this reality.
The basic problem of the Philippine public education system is a deep mismatch between our priorities and our capabilities, and this mismatch culminates with the educated among us leaving our country for better opportunities abroad. Our people do not lack the will, the imagination, and the intellect to succeed, only the opportunity to do so.
Towards the end of every school year, I share a similar conversation with many of my graduating students. Whenever we converse about their plans and they express to me their desire to really pursue further scientific research, they guiltily confess that they can only see a genuine future in that if they emigrate. At the least, some feel they have more to learn abroad before they can really contribute something here. Others feel that more lucrative careers await abroad, and that they can only help others succeed once they have done so first.
Being the social science teacher, I argue that they can learn just as much here, or that their definition of success can be reoriented towards helping others succeed first too. I am proud of the debates that ensue and when the dust settles, one thing we all have in common is the belief that if conditions were different here, they would not find it necessary to leave. That is generally the case with everyone else who leaves. But one student put it even more plainly, “I want to be in a society that allows me to succeed.”
In The Global Achievement Gap, American educator, Tony Wagner, writes about the seven survival skills that teens need today. He discusses how focus must shift away from plain memorization and mastery of content but towards developing skills in critical thinking and problem solving, collaborating across networks, agility and adaptability, entrepreneurship, effective oral and written communication, accessing and analyzing information, and curiosity and imagination. He argues that a teacher’s success lies in equipping his or her students with these skills and preparing them for situations and problems that they will encounter in real life. Teaching them about history, science and math is then contextualized and made practical, preparing students for success no matter the challenges they face.
These almost seem too progressive. In other chapters, Wagner talks about schools in America that have foregone written, standardized tests and instead pioneered student-specific testing through interviews and creative work. This seems too far for us. And yet, in 2006, a Filipino teacher from Iloilo won the Intel International Excellence in Teaching Award for bringing science alive to her students. She brought them to field trips, introduced them to working scientists in the province, and held her classes underneath trees. She layered every single science concept with a social dimension, and made sure that her students left her classroom not just as excellent students, but as learned citizens. But perhaps she is most warmly remembered for that quaint moment in the competition when she had to borrow a laptop from another participant because she didn’t have one. Arguably, she didn’t need one. Her name is Dr. Josette Biyo, a reminder for all of us Filipinos invested in the education of our children that the 21st century isn’t so far from us at all.
Bridging the gap and fixing the mismatch really begins in the classroom. Teachers such as her illustrate how individual effort can lead to innovation, but her success need not be her own. There is much to be learned from her, but also more to gain from a system that allows for success such as hers to reproduce. Teacher training is definitely a start, and then we pay greater attention to how she defined her work by her students’ success.
I am under no illusion that our problems with governance and policy will just go away. Yet this is hardly a reason for us to tame our ambitions and dwell on smaller things. Yes, there will be a hierarchy of needs to follow; before we sound like Wagner, we will have to build the classrooms and halls from which we’ll teach. But we are in dire need of realigning yesterday’s priorities with tomorrow’s needs. Our graduates are greeted by a different world every year, so it is never too early for us to meet and match our next challenges today.
Further reading:
After Obama’s speech in Cairo, commentators coined the 
