Reorienting Education in the Time of Covid 19

Way back in 1987, a history professor titillated my imagination and challenged my previous knowledge on Philippine history by posing this observation: “Why do your teachers in elementary and high school keep asking quiz questions like: ‘Who is the Joan of Arc of the Visayas?’ or ‘Who is the Joan of Arc of the Philippines?’ Why? Do the French ask their students, who is the Teresa Magbanua or Gabriela Silang of France?”  

To bring home the point at the end of one of his lectures, that same professor of mine had argued: “Why do some of us Filipinos say, ‘Ang sarap ng turon, parang apple pie?’ when they should be saying ‘Ang sarap ng apple pie, parang turon?’

[At bakit nga ba ako nagsusulat sa Inggles? But that’s another story, for another article]. Yes, there you have the so-called colonial mentality of some of our people and, tragically, it is a perspective that continues to be reproduced in our schools.

Basic education, in particular, is supposedly designed to be relevant to the needs of students in their respective communities. Determining the historical extent of such relevance poses an interesting line of research especially since standards in the country’s school system evolved through more than 150 years of centralized policy making. From the Spanish colonial era to the American occupation, down to the brief Japanese invasion, and through at least six decades of self-rule, policies of the Department of Education were all formulated in Manila (or other urban centers) in the interest of an elite that looks out to other countries and nations for templates, models and ideals to copy.

The country’s first public schools are said to have offered basic education that were, as far as practicable, adaptable at the community level. Children from agricultural and fisheries communities were given instruction relevant to common forms of livelihood such as horticulture and aquaculture in their respective towns or villages. Eventually, high schools in industrialized towns or cities offered curricula that enabled students to be employable in factories through more instruction on vocational subjects referred to as “practical arts.” Much of these were standardized at the school district level. This practice was in effect up to the mid-1990s when arts and vocational training and instruction were still within the jurisdiction of the Department of Education. The net effect of al these historical developments has aligned the country to be a cog in a global economic machine.

Today, before this ongoing pandemic slowed down the operation of this global machine, one could very well say that the country has been mass producing mainly low-cost but very reliable workers for the global capitalist order — teachers and nurses for the US, maids and caregivers for Europe, domestic helpers and mechanics for the Middle East, dancers and singers for Hongkong, seafarers and merchant mariners for the oceans of the world, and much more.  

Consider this single fact alone: a graduate of perhaps the most coveted science high school in the Philippines produced the head chef for the White House. From high-quality science education to serving the gastronomic pleasure of the most powerful leader in the capitalist world—if that is not about producing workers for the world, I do not know what is.

Reforming Education through the Years. The comprehensive Education Commission Report of 1991 (EDCOM Report or the Congressional Commission Report on Education of 1991) eventually led to organizational changes to attempt reforms in the national curricular design. 

In August 2001, Republic Act 9155 or the Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001 was supposed to decentralize the development and implementation of the curricula for elementary and high schools. Ideally, it should have meant that power and jurisdiction were accorded to the field, that is, to regional offices, division offices, district offices, and ultimately individual schools. Moreover, the functions of educating the youth on culture and sports and other concerns were detached from what is now simply clled the “Department of Education” or DEPED. What in the past was a single big bureaucracy that handled all areas and levels of education including culture, as well as sports, is now supposedly leaner and focused on just basic education. 

The creation of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) in 1994 through Republic Act 7722 detached the DEPED from the tertiary level education bureaucracy. In 1995, when the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority or TESDA was established through Republic Act 7796, all non-degree technical-vocational skills programs were removed from the Department of Education’s area of responsibility as well.   

By 1999, when a significant area of physical education development was assigned to the Philippine Sports Commission, the Department of Education central office was left with even less concerns so it can focus on just basic education. 

As expected, decentralizing what used to be for decades a centralized large formal bureaucracy would take time to fine tune. And with the continuing voluminous increase in the school-going population, the challenge has been overwhelming.

Today, under a so-called “trifocalization” approach, the Department of Education (DEPED), the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) comprise the government’s education bureaucracy. DEPED and CHED are particularly responsible for at least 47,000 basic education schools, over 2,300 higher education institutions, over a million teachers and workers, 31.3 million students (2017), and a budget of over P553 billion for 2018.

In under a decade, this massive education sector has undergone a series of relatively rapid changes. First, there was the implementation of Universal Kindergarten a law signed in 20 January 2012. This required children five years old and above to undergo and pass kindergarten before moving on to Grade 1. 

Furthermore, there is now this supposedly “enhanced curriculum” for Grade 1 to Grade 7 (or what used to be 1st year high school) rolled out in 2012. DepEd also added two additional years of high school with the signing of the Enhanced Basic Education Act in May 15, 2013. Grade 11 was introduced in 2016 and Grade 12 in 2017. The first full batch of high school students to go through K-to-12 education just graduated in March 2018.

Education Reforms for Whom? Scholars in the theory of education have argued that In countries like the Philippines where the introduction of the formal education system as well as of a new written language and the knowledge encoded in them were part of the process of colonization, there is a general predisposition towards undue abstraction of knowledge that is created through the formal system. This leads to the fundamental problem of the irrelevance of the formal system of education to the lives and aspirations of the common people. In other words, there is discontinuity in what the formal curricula prescribes and what the community requires. 

 It is further posited that his fundamentally problematic situation has led to—as the late Dr. Ma. Luisa Doronilla of the University of the Philippines has so eloquently put it—the creation of students who are not only under-performing at their expected level, but also: (1) Have a Western consciousness or are biased in favor of foreigners and imported materials and ideas; (2) Tend to favor authoritarianism as a political system or are not pro-people; (3) Lack critical thinking skills; (4) Are sexist or homophobic in attitude; and, (5) Do not value the health of the physical environment.

What is most clear in all these recent reforms is that we have created a more effective mass production system that feeds workers into the global production system. The lengthening of the number of years for school-going in the K-to-12 system and related shift in school calendar, for instance, is in the main a response to the work and education requirements of other countries which have longer school-going years. They are not really a response to our actual and immediate needs—unless one considers massive migration a basic need. 

In short, we continue to produce cheap labor for the rest of the world. However, this pandemic has led to the repatriation of over half a million migrant Filipino workers from all over the world. We have to re-orient our efforts to continue to reform education curricula and improve the overall education quality in the country. The global situation created by Covid 19 has forced the issue that these efforts must truly root themselves in a broader historical analysis of the social functions of education. Only then can we meaningfully debate on what education this country needs.