Reference to GMA News Online report,
If you asked me what should be done, just one concrete strategy, in reforming Philippine education system, I'd say: abolish all the honors system in grade school and high school.
Kung gusto pa rin nating may mga awards, gawin na lang na gaya ng sa college na kahit ilan puwedeng maging summa, magna, cum laude, o nasa dean's list; hindi lang isang valedictorian at isang salutatorian sa bawat batch.
Also, abolish the hierarchy of sections. Abolish din ang mga row 1, row 2, row 3, at row 4. These divisions, segregations, or categorisations of pupils/students are not good for learning.
Dapat pantay-pantay. All students must be given the same high quality facilities and teachers.
In this news report, there's really fundamentally wrong in our institutions. The default response or knee-jerk reaction of the country's institutions whenever there is a problem is to immediately deal with it as a 'legal' issue.
When we do 'reform', we have to critically ask the principles, ethos, or philosophy — yes, even the politics —, behind (or underpinning) the rules or laws that must be questioned and examined.
My sense is that the K to 12 educational reform experiment in the Philippines will likely fail if 'equality' is not its defined and desired telos. Based on my observation, a crucial difference between successful K to 12 system in Nordic countries (especially Finland) and the new K to 12 in the Philippines (or the US) has to do with the 'goal' or 'objective' of education.
In the successful case of Finland, for example, it's very clear that the goal of education is
- towards 'equality' (which encourages cooperation while discovering one's talents and pursuing one's life's purpose),
- not 'excellence' or 'competitiveness' (which, as we see in the Philippines, leads to selfishness, egoism, and ugly competition).
If 'equality' is not a goal of education in the K to 12, the terrible US case shows that those who pursue the 'vocational' track are stigmatized and subsumed under the 'academic' track.
While 'learning' is the means and ends of education in Finland to develop students' real-world problem-solving skills; the Philippines is obsessed with 'testing' that encourages short-termist 'rote memorization' skills.
May this incident open up some serious rethinking about the country's education reform process, and not waste our time with non-sensical bickering between these innocent children who are victims of the deeply flawed principle, philosophy, and policy of education that we have had from the very beginning.
* * *
Here are excerpts of the comments I made to friends' comments in Facebook:
1.
[E]ducation policy should be part of, coordinated with, each and every socioeconomic reform policy in the country towards a particular national goal. Our country's problems are so convoluted and complex already that require comprehensive, wholistic, and coordinated approach.
2.
The first order problem of the Philippines is 'poverty' (which is a largely 'economic' issue), but a more difficult and sensitive issue linked to it is 'inequality' (which has a 'class' dimension). Both of these have to be addressed, and education policy must be integral to solving these causes of Philippine socioeconomic problems. What you've pointed out as the 'achievement gap' is a symptom of these causes.
I'm a believer of 'universalism' and the principle of solidarity, which is different from your proposed 'targeting' approach. The latter has long been employed by different Philippine administrations, patterned after the US-style of 'equitably' allocating state resources. The former must be tried out, and there are already studies about its viability in developing country contexts as well as policy prescriptions for it made by scholars and researchers who contribute to UN-level research.
3.
[Do] not to target the 'poor', but target 'poverty'.
I get your point on 'equality' and 'equity'. The 'equality' in my mind is anchored to the principle of 'social justice' -- where the allocation of government resources and programmes are context-specific, in the sense that these must be 'learner-centered' and oriented towards particular student's needs and abilities. This conception is, therefore, a synthesis of your equality-equity graphical representation in the blog post.
P.S. I touched on this 'learner-centered' idea a bit in my current 'teaching statement' - although this is at higher education level.
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