Too much agreement kills a chat

The most efficient organizations today, government or private, depend heavily on fresh ideas. These organizations hunt for such ideas like treasure. They invest substantial amounts of time, effort, and money to be the first to get hold of them. To these organizations, it doesn’t really matter whom ideas come from so long as they can be profitable. The unscrupulous would steal them and not blink. Truly, brilliant ideas, even initially strange and unconventional ones are the lifeblood of any organization striving to survive and excel in today’s cut-throat economy. From computing, to engineering, to medicine, and definitely, to pedagogy, new ideas sustain us all. The old give way to the new. Challenging the norm is now the norm.

Sadly, however, DepEd for half a century now, has been missing much of the action, lagging behind in sloth. Our people have so dearly been paying the price for longer than anyone could remember and we cannot afford it anymore. The Asian region has been moving up for the past 60 years while the Philippines stumbles over one hurdle to another—one endless national emergency. It is not surprising that outsiders go as far as calling us a “damaged culture.” Painful to admit, but we are still “The sick man of Asia.”

But, worse than passivity are the blunders committed in all levels of the department:

Our curriculum. Ever changing, yet, ever inferior to those of our neighbors’. Perennially impoverished India now has more engineers and IT people than the entire North America. They are now selling the most cost-effective car in the world, the “Nano.” Talk to the average Indian living here and you’d be amazed at just how educated they are and how much better their values are set compared to many of ours. South Korea, destroyed by war in 1950, and with no natural resource to speak of, has now better-educated children than we have. They have phenomenal work ethic and are knowledgeable in all things that matter. They build things and we buy them. War-beaten Vietnam is now hiring our teachers for up to ten times the rate. Again, these people are disciplined as well as good natured, and therefore, advancing, fast. Malaysia is ahead of us as well, and tiny Singapore joined the big league generations ago. While other Asian children are learning how to build robots and super computers, ours are painting little potteries or embossing Xeroxed drawings with colored sand—on a national scale, for heaven’s sake!

Our books. So scandalously flawed, they make it on prime time news. Priorities other than education have apparently taken precedence over education itself.

Our teachers. Flooded with paper work they can hardly do their job of actually teaching. Outputs, outputs, and more outputs, forms, forms, and more forms, all for the heck of it, all for show. DepEd never seems to run out of new forms to fill out, surveys to respond to, and reports to write, as if, they actually boost up anything other than some people’s careers. The whole clunky machinery effectively reduces the ten-month school year to just nine months, the last week of February and the first three weeks of March being eaten up by paperwork. Students’ records are still done by hand, painfully detailed and ridiculously redundant. It seems that everything is thrown to the teachers to make someone’s job a lot easier. The result are fabricated data, useless, except for complying with requirements. Millions of man-hours, and hundreds of tons of paper wasted every year. But unquantifiable is the amount of stress this madness brings to the teachers year after year, for generations on end!

It’s 2010 and our teachers still line– inside and outside Landbank offices around the country for two hours, to cash their checks. Those in charge couldn’t care less. They must think this is all as it should be. They must think teachers got nothing better to do. When the checks are late, teachers are expected to wait and not say a word. It’s “unteacherlike” to complain. They are supposed to learn to wait. Why must DepEd checks be late in the first place? Is the pay check a new concept they at DepEd haven’t already gotten the hang of?

Those that can’t take it anymore go to Hong Kong as domestics, tearing their families apart. Licensed teachers! No wonder most of our colleagues have stopped caring long ago, numbed by the decades of neglect and abuse from an indifferent government, from pompous PhD superiors, and from street-smart principals.

But here is truly frightening: young teachers, in their 20s, already adapted to the “system.” Like clones of those before them, they quickly learn the “tricks of the trade” – without actually learning the trade. More paperwork? Bring it on. There are always the children. Deadline? It’s time for the children to copy the book into their notebooks. Look where DepEd has brought our teachers!

The National Achievement Test is one expensive yearly joke, with unspeakable repercussions: a delusional national curriculum. Bottom line, it’s an economic sabotage stunting the growth of entire generations of Filipinos. Where else in the world will one find teachers giving away answers to a national examination, year after year? Apparently, it’s the easiest way to keep Division Supervisors from breathing down their necks, demanding better scores.

Dropout rate continues to hover in the disastrous, and many “make it” by pasang awa—which is neither real “pasado” nor real “awa”. Everybody must pass to give room, literally, for the next batch of students. There’s no room for repeaters; just give them a high school diploma and hope it lands them a job, any job. What decent country does this?

Too many of our students are undisciplined and indifferent, perhaps, due to malnutrition and perhaps, after ingesting too much MSG and refined sugar—worse, aspartame—found in abundance in our school cafeterias. But even then, they might behave just a little better had we educators been the slightest bit inspiring.

Administrators and school heads are so preoccupied with garnering points for promotion. DepEd-sponsored seminars right and left, all done for the sake of “complying with requirements”, all at the expense of the taxpayer. Yet, there is little to no drive in them. Hardly any initiative. No desire to deliver real, honest to goodness education. It’s enough to get high NAT scores, win competitions, and receive recognitions and trophies. And then, get the best retirement possible.

Paternalism is still deeply ingrained in our national psyche. No one even knows it’s there. Administrators are nothing more than modern Datus, lording it over their little domains. Hasn’t anyone at DepEd heard of Consultative and Participative Management? Google it, for cryin’ out loud!

How many of our administrators actually have a vision for our country and are not mere career people? How many of us really care? DepEd is big on form but puny on substance. We are the proverbial “ampaw”, big, but full of air. Nobody respects us, not even the least educated of our countrymen, certainly not the rest of the world. There is no real leadership to speak of in DepEd, just plain old I’ll-scratch-your-back-you scratch-mine type of affair.

Most teachers are just weathering out the rotten culture, trying to protect what little career they are permitted to grow old with. “Tumahimik ka na lang kung ayaw mong mapag-initan.” “Wag ka nang magpakahirap, nasa public school ka naman.” “Sumunod ka sa kalakaran.” “Fifty years nang ganito ang sistema namin, babaguhin mo pa?”

How did we ever get into this mess? Could we ever redeem ourselves? Do we even care enough to risk personal interests, our cherished careers and our quiet lives? How long are we just going to draw our breaths, and then our salaries, both of which there’s too little of?

Good news! This need not continue to beset us! We need not pass this curse down to our grandchildren. We can still choose to reverse our fate. We can still pull ourselves out of this wretched socioeconomic and spiritual poverty and turn our country to one deserving respect. Respect from among ourselves and from among the nations of the world.

And the best place to start is not with the formulation of new rules, stricter regulations or more elaborate protocols. Yes, we need all those, and progressively, but they are not worth the paper they are written on if our hearts are not set right. Yes, the best, and truly, the only place to start is in our individual hearts. The wishes of our hearts dictate our choices. The choices that we make dictate our actions. The actions that we take dictate our future.

This is what must be done: First, administrators must stop seeing themselves as masters but as servants. It’s so clichéd, but we are actually servants of the people, servants of our children, regardless if we forgot it. Those in-charge must stop acting like taskmasters and start acting like leaders. We need leader-servants. They must stop pushing teachers to their limits and start inspiring them to push their own limits. Teachers must stop being mere executors of plans emanating upstairs, but vital sources of new ideas and catalysts of change. They must become co-planners and co-designers of education, being at the forefront of the battle against ignorance and complacency. Educators must be the source of inspiration and of strength to our children. We must stand for all that is right, despite the prevailing culture. Our children expects this of us; they are aching for it! True leaders do not just tell people what to do, they show them by example.

Mutual respect must be our binding force, from the Secretary of Education, to the school janitor. These are not mere words! Teachers must be treated as professionals and they must act as such. They must be treated with respect, even when at fault. Teachers must be recognized for their good work. They must be consulted on matters affecting them and their families. They must be consulted on matters of education–they are educators. They must be given what is due them, when it is due them. The amount of work given them must be calibrated to what is realistically doable, given the 400 to 600-plus students they need to teach each day, and the voluminous records that follow. Minimize paper use and turn to electronic means—it’s 2010! Deped is a behemoth: It blinks and forest turns to desert. So, workflows must be streamlined to bare necessities. No redundancies. No distractions from the teachers’ primary responsibility, which is teaching. Give them the opportunity to grow, not only academically but as total professionals and total human beings. Give them time to breathe, to be with their families and to be with themselves. Protect their psychological well-being at all cost as it is the key to their full functioning as shapers of our national destiny. Teachers with shattered egos, crushed hearts, and barely-there bank accounts cannot be model citizens let alone true educators. Neglecting our teachers, or worse, abusing them, is destructive to our nation. The effect is sure and quick.

Teachers, in turn, must respect all students, even the least able, even least privileged of them. Let us not ask an underprivileged student to do for us what we will not ask a senator’s son or daughter. Students are not in school to run teachers’ errands but to be equipped for national leadership, leaders of our country, not servants of other countries. Let us develop their self-respect by respecting them first. Let us feed them properly in school and let us keep them safe there. Let us take care of them as we would our own. They are our own, all of them.

“There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.” - Nelson Mandela

Educators must be the architects of our culture, not its victims. They cannot let themselves to be tossed by the tide—they must create and control the tide. They cannot just watch things happen; they must make things happen. There are two kinds of fish in the stream, those that go against it and those that are carried away by it. The latter are dead fish.

If we resolutely start today, we can have a completely new Philippines in as soon as ten years. Ten short years and we could be on our way to becoming a progressive nation, with strong, educated youth, high in spirit and full of hope. If we could change just one generation of Filipinos, our country could finally achieve our dreams as a nation. Dreams of prosperity and esteem among the nations.

DepEd has over half a million trained and talented professionals in its arsenal–teachers, administrators, and non-teaching personnel. But, presently, we are like a badly maintained eight-cylinder muscle car, aimlessly chugging around on only four. This huge manpower and intellectual powerhouse could propel our country to heights never before seen in our history. Imagine what half a million highly motivated professionals can do as they mould our children’s minds eight hours a day, for the ten crucial years of their lives! We can put this country back on its feet! More than anyone else’s, this is our job, our mandate. We are the shapers of the national mind.

The Asian region is rushing on to progress. Most of our neighbors have arrived long ago. We have been lagging behind for far too long, but this could change right now. Let us stop blaming our culture; we created it. Let us stop blaming poverty; we invited it. Let us stop blaming the politicians; they too, were in grade school once. The buck stops here.

Let us do this. Let us not wait.