August 4, 2010

For insisting on extra two years of basic education

LFS labels Sec. Luistro a naïve policymaker

“How naïve can you get Bro. Armin? We’ve been lobbying for a higher budget for education the last decade but to no avail, and you expect government to now fund fully basic education together with your additional two-year proposal? You and your folks in Education Nation are living in a dream world.”

This was the statement Terry Ridon, national chairperson of the League of Filipino Students as the militant student group lambasted Department of Education Secretary Armin Luistro for rejecting the position of student groups and Ateneo de Manila University President Fr. Bienvenido Nebres that government should focus more on the problems of basic education today, instead of increasing the number of years of basic schooling.

Ridon said that even if government increases the number of years of basic education, for as long as the average student-teacher ratio remains at 80:1, the quality of education in the country would remain stunted.

“An additional two years of basic schooling would only mean that funding that should be given for the building of classrooms, the repair of dilapidated facilities and the purchase of more textbooks, shall be diverted to the costs of operations of that additional two years. Tell us, how then do we address the more basic problems with such diversion of funding?”

Ridon said that the DepEd is wrong in comparing the supposed international standard of twelve years of basic education with the ten-year model followed by the country.

“No comparison can be made because the rest of world fully funds their public education system, while the country had slashed its education budget several times to accommodate automatic debt servicing and bloody counter-insurgency programs. A most basic policy requisite – full funding of public education is missing in Philippine education policy.”

Ridon advised Sec. Luistro to rethink its proposal and heed the position of students and Fr. Nebres to stick first to the more basic problems of the lack of classrooms, dilapidated textbooks, poor teacher training before embarking on untested waters such as the additional two years of basic education.