Poor Education
The poor never really place education as one of their top priorities. They prioritize basic needs such as food and shelter. As it turns out, food and shelter are both categorized under basic needs, which are needed for immediate survival, while education (and health care) on the other hand, is an essential need that is necessary for future survival. In most cases, the poor, having only limited income and resources, forgo future survival, for immediate survival just to make ends meet in their daily expenditures.
For families earning around P50,000-P59,999 ($1,315-$1,579) annually, 57.6% of that amount is already allocated for food alone. 18.6% is handed for shelter, 3.7% is for clothing, 3.2% is for transport, and 12.7% for other expenses. Education and medical care are both in the bottom list with 2.4% and 1.8% respectively (National Statistics Office). These figures abide by the Engle law, wherein the percentage of food increases as income decreases which suggests a climbing intensity of poverty in the other basic needs. In short, the poorer the family, the more importance is given to basic needs and education gets neglected in the process.
Education always had a part in the Philippine government?s policies. Education always had a contribution in the formulation of Government policies. Since the 1946 introduction of free education for the primary level, numerous programs and projects have been launched to distribute education to the entire population. Unfortunately, as promising as these programs were, some key factors were overlooked, thus resulting in an ironic deterioration of the educational system. Instead of reaping the products of these programs, the backfire only entrenched the rooting problem.
One of the key elements is that the government gave more priority to the quantity of admission, rather than to the quality of education. The government paid little attention to other factors such as facilities and teacher salaries, and only concentrated on getting classrooms filled and overcrowded. In most cases, public schools had to take shifts in order to accommodate such large volumes of students. As a result, the school has to cut down time spent on lessons and subjects per day. In addition, the teachers often have to manage with obsolete equipment due to in adequate funding. Since their salaries are low, only a handful desires the teaching profession, thus increasing the ratio between pupil and teacher. As a result, teachers have to handle a bigger volume of students making the quality of education degraded.
The educational system is already poor as it is. For instance, lessons are often discussed in the trivial level without any analysis whatsoever. Students arrive unprepared for the lessons, and teachers spend more time keeping their class quiet than actually teaching. Furthermore, the teacher dictates the facts, instead of students drawing up their own conclusions, and group work is usually conducted wherein individual analysis would be sufficient. Students are made to do memory work without fully understanding what they?re supposed to learn in the first place.
These students already poorly-educated as they are, with a home environment educationally devoid, have slim chances of getting better education usually provided by private institutions and state universities. They often end up landing on low-paying manual labor opportunities.
Education determines the quality of the labor force. The higher the education attainment, the more skilled workers become. In turn, with highly skilled workers, more opportunities would be available and little by little, their lives would start to improve. People would eventually rise from the ashes of poverty. Unfortunately, the Philippines? educational portfolio has been painting a contrasting portrait of this concept, and the picture continues to darken unless some changes take place soon.
This crisis raises the stakes on the productivity level of the future workforce. As it turns out, the highest educational attainment for 72% of all poor households is primary education. Plus More than 50% of children do not reach grade six (6), they tend to be school dropouts as early as grade one (1). This means that at tender ages of 7-8 years, these children are cursed to a life of poverty. In addition, 67% of children, who get to finish the intermediate levels don?t even proceed to high school. Finally, for those who enter secondary schooling, they drop out after their first or second year. At this rate, almost 55% of those entering the labor force will only have attained first year high school education. These staggering figures pose a big gamble indeed for the country?s economic progress.
Tomorrow?s society is heavily dependent on what is taught in today?s classrooms. If such ailing quality of education remains then the adults of tomorrow won?t be much different than the hapless kids of today.