THE TRAGEDY OF EDUCATIONAL STRATIFICATION IN THE PHILIPPINES

There are many Filipinos who take education as their course in college. Many schools of higher education offer it as one of its majors. Even the newly established ones are offering the education course, peddling it as if it is so easy to train or produce good teachers. Why is it that many teachers are needed in the country? Why are so many schools offering education degrees mushrooming?


The population of the country is burgeoning. It is one of the fastest growing populations in the world. The government has failed to curb it because of a vocal church that is against family planning methods such as the use of contraceptives – plus the fact that government programs normally and traditionally go nowhere because of, what else but, corruption. But even then, the predominantly Catholic country is populated with Catholic Christians who do not necessarily follow church teachings when it comes to planning the family. All these result in poverty as having many children in an underdeveloped setting means more mouths to feed.


It has been a worldwide sociological phenomenon that in poor countries, those coming from the lower classes usually have more children than their richer counterparts. One theory is that they need more hands to feed the whole family, as in the feudal setting of rural areas or in squatter colonies of urban centers. But the other view is that poverty leads to lack of education, and lack of education leads to ignorance regarding the socio-economic consequences of having more children. The opposite is also noticeable: those belonging to the upper strata of society have less number of children. The theory posed is that the richer couples are busier with economic activities, and that their being more educated makes them plan their family with economic, health, and educational priorities in mind, not to mention individualistic or social pursuits such as acquiring skills in certain arts or traveling, respectively.

With the rising population of the Philippines, the country is unable to effectively absorb people in its workforce. Thus, the government since the time of President Ferdinand Marcos up to the present has made it official state policy to export labor. The waves during the 1970s included engineers and manual laborers sent to the Middle East. Later, this was followed by doctors and more manual laborers during the 1980s, not only in Arab countries but also in the United States. During the 1990s, Filipino entertainers went to Japan and other Asian countries. At the turn of the century, Filipino nurses and other health workers began to invade Western Europe and other countries of North America. All throughout these periods, Filipino seafarers have dominated shipping, providing cheap labor to the biggest shipping companies of the world. All these mean that both manual laborers and professionals were able to send their hard-earned money to their relatives in the Philippines. This also meant greater access to education, not only in public but phenomenally also in private schools, for those belonging to the lower classes of Philippine society.

The combined factors of population growth and the entry of dollars sent by Overseas Filipino Workers assured not only the survival but also the proliferation of educational institutions in the country. During the beginning until the half of the 20th century, the whole educational system developed under the rubric of the public school v. private school dichotomy. The public school system built by the United States during its colonization of the country was typified by quality that can be availed of by the ordinary Filipinos. But the system having been transferred into the hands of the Filipinos, especially after the Second World War, the quality of the system has deteriorated. In the meantime, the exclusive schools where the rich children enroll have improved relative to the public school system. The trend of the poor going to the public, and the rich going to the private schools, therefore, continued but with a twist: those who are not rich but can somehow afford to pay tuition because of OFW money started to prefer to send their children to private schools.

The private school system was initially dominated by Catholic educational institutions. Eventually, however, rich families started putting up their own private schools. As the population increases and demands from the lower and lower middle classes for quality but cheap education heightened, the Catholic schools have started to offer places in school at a cheaper rate, but with more students per classroom. There are only very few Catholic schools that have maintained its quality as supported by extremely high tuition. Meanwhile, large privately owned non-sectarian schools started to compete for the lower-income population. Thus, following the model of many Catholic schools offering classes at affordable rates, these non-sectarian private schools have increased also their class sizes to recoup their investments.

In the end, the country is now faced not only with the traditional dichotomy as to public and private ownership. More pronounced now, and very disturbing at that, is the dichotomy as to quality orientation v. the lack of quality among schools. Many Catholic educational institutions have become commercialized, too, together with huge privately-owned non-sectarian schools. Thus, their quality deteriorated along the way. In the meantime, the continuous neglect of various post-war administrations assured that the public school systems can no longer be mistaken to be the same quality-oriented public school system established by the Americans. The whole educational system, therefore, is now dominated by weak educational institutions. Quality schools are more of an exception, both in public and in private schools. In the public sector, only the Science High Schools and a handful of state colleges and universities can be considered excellent. In the private sector, only a handful, too, of Catholic schools and non-sectarian private schools are quality-oriented.


In the meantime, the forces for lack of quality continue to pressure the whole educational system: the escalating population; the aspiration of Overseas Filipino Workers remitting dollars to the country to provide their children with education; and the lack of real government action to solve the lack of funding, low quality of teachers, and lack of classrooms. Now, it has become a cycle: the lack of quality produces even more lack of quality. The remaining quality institutions have become, on the other hand, more elitist as the pressure to support quality rests on higher tuition and strict implementation of admissions policies to weed out students who are ill-trained in the earlier years of their education.


What has been happening in Philippine education is a tragedy. Needless to say, mainly the rich are able to get quality education, and only very few poor students from the Science High Schools are produced yearly. With this current educational systemic reality in place, one wonders if there will be real hope for the majority of the Filipinos.





Prof. Rolando S. Dela Cruz

16 March 2010, 1:06 am