Sharing Experiences

Our communities have always placed a high value on educational attainment. In the information age, education has become even more intensely coveted as a prized personal asset as well as a critical national resource. Families beg and borrow to be able to send children to school. Governments proclaim education as the key to global competitiveness. Social reformers consider it the long term answer to such intractable problems as sexually transmitted diseases, environmental degradation, racial and religious rivalries, class and economic inequities, gender discrimination, political corruption, and human rights violations. For this reason, these reformers persistently lobby for the inclusion of their advocacies in the educational curriculum.

Over the years, we have come to the clear consensus that we must all strive to make quality education available to our citizens. Previous meetings have identified the various barriers that block access to educational opportunities for our people. They have also progressively spelled out components that make up the package we describe as "quality education." We have always known, but perhaps the 1997 Asian financial crisis made us realize more sharply, that the ideals of universal quality education remain a far distance from our grasp.

The goal appears indeed to be slipping farther away, becoming more elusive. Technological advances in the First World countries continue to raise the bar that we must surmount to meet quality standards. Because the strongest technology leaders inevitably set the pace of the march, quality goals become moving targets and increasingly more difficult to achieve. Fifteen or even ten years ago, we did not have to worry about a "digital divide." Now we hear about hall-a dozen or more new disciplines - genetic engineering, nanotechnology, molecular medicine, artificial intelligence and more arcane reaches of computer technology that only the wealthiest among us can penetrate.

We do not even need to factor in the costs of natural and man made calamities, including the toll taken by corruption and internal armed conflicts, that drain resources we can otherwise spend on education. Population growth, by itself, continues, in many of our countries, to demand higher levels of investment in education to meet just the basic learning needs of our societies.

Perhaps, like UNESCO, we may have to trim our expectations. With an estimated 895 million illiterate people around the world in 1990, UNESCO launched the World Literacy year in Jomtien, Thailand aiming to eradicate illiteracy in ten years. At the end of the decade, the number of illiterate people did show a drop. Instead of 895 million illiterate people, there were in 2000 only 875 million people, less than a 3% accomplishment of the ambitious target. No longer speaking in terrns of eradication, UNESCO hoped that by 2010, there would only be 830 million illiterate people.

With the cost of quality education rising to prohibitive levels, the problem we confront is not a digital divide, it is an education divide. Political and business leaders worry about how their education system compares with those of other countries. In recent years, ranking in international assessments tests have become, like GNP and GDP, new benchmarks of development.

We cannot evade the responsibility of measuring and monitoring the distance that separates us from the evolving global educational standards. But our greater concern ought to be the educational divide within our own societies. We have always promoted education as the Great Equalizer. We assure our people that, through education, they can improve their lot, rise above the station in which they were born, ensure a better future for their children. But if we fail to address the internal education divide between the elite schools and diploma mills, education will create and sustain greater inequalities. Education will become the Great Disequalizer.

How do we address this challenge, given the resource constraints that the global economic slowdown has forced upon governments?

A Philippine Initiative

We have not abandoned in the Philippines the goal of providing quality education for our children. But we have taken a hard look at the requirements to meet this goal and the available government resources. We have come to a number of conclusions. First, under conditions of resource constraints, universal access and quality education become competing objectives. We must confront the issue of the acceptable trade offs. Second, government must realign scarce resources to address the most critical priorities. Additional funds must go to basic before tertiary education, to primary before secondary education. Third, government cannot carry the entire burden of education by itself and that, in any case, education is too important to be left entirely to government.

A few months before my appointment as Secretary of Education, a private foundation, on whose board I served, started a programme to mobilize community support for the public basic education system. Established to promote and reinforce the values reflected in the first EDSA People Power Revolution, our original objective was to strengthen civic education in the schools. We believed that only citizens who were mindful of their rights and responsibilities as citizens could legitimately invoke People Power against oppressive institutions. But listening to other NGOs describe the conditions in many public primary and secondary school, we decided that we needed to engage civil society to assist the public basic education schools. The Foundation launched what it called Adopt A School Programme.

Shortly after assuming my office, I discovered that Congress had actually passed a law for an Adopt A School Programme in 2000. Unfortunately, the implementing guidelines bars the critical element in that law. The provision for tax incentives has never been issued. I am happy to note that these guidelines, drafted in collaboration with the Bureau of Internal Revenue, were approved two days ago by the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Secretary of Finance.

Other countries in the region also recognized the potential contribution that the private sector can make to the task of education. Two years ago, I participated, as a representative of private educational institutions, in meetings convened by SEAMEO Regional Centre for Higher Education and Development (RIHED) in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. These meetings explored options for encouraging greater participation of the private sector in the provision of educational services.

A Regional Project

The Philippine experience, like RIHED initiatives and the common problem of limited government resources suggest to me that the issue of mobilizing community support for education may be relevant to other countries as well.

During the year of my service as SEAMEO president, I propose to undertake a regional project that will explore how we can engage communities for more meaningful involvement in educational development. The terms of engagement cannot focus only on extracting resources from the community. Government must also review whether its programmes genuinely meet the learning needs of its various communities. Surely, schools that operate in a remote agricultural village in the uplands will have different concerns from those serving coastal communities of subsistence fishermen or informal settlements in highly congested cities.

We need to learn from a wide range of experiences and would profit from a study of school community engagement models across and beyond the region. We will encourage our regional centers to help transform schools into learning centers that can connect with partner groups from the communities they serve.

News clippings: H E Dr Edilberto C de Jesus, SEAMEC President

SEAMOLEC Info Vol.VIII No.17 [May 2004]
Myanmar Education Updates Vol. 2 No. 2 [June 2003]