SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Haydar Usman Yusoph is an incoming Grade 2 pupil at San Agustin Elementary School in Novaliches, Quezon City. His father, Eli, works as a supervisor of a five-man security group at a middle-class subdivision in the area. Eli’s take-home pay is just enough for the family’s needs, including milk for a newborn daughter and monthly rent for a makeshift house. By re-enrolling his only son in a public school, Eli paid only P210 in annual PTA dues. After enrollment, father and son went home bringing with them the batch of books Haydar will be using for the rest of the school year.

The good news is that elementary education in Philippine public schools remains free. The bad news – and there are quite a number of them – starts rolling in even before classes start.

A pupil must have at least paper and pencil, bag, a pair of shoes and a decent pair of shirt and pants or a skirt. Every day before going to school, the student must have breakfast, take a bath, brush his teeth and comb his hair. He must have money for at least one meal in school and for tricycle fare, if he has to commute to and from and school. It is estimated that these daily expenses add up to around P5,000 a year, something a laborer feeding and housing a family of five does not have.

So, the average pupil takes a walk to school in slippers wearing last year’s faded shirt and a pair of pants or a skirt with broken zippers. What will pass for breakfast and snacks is a 1 peso gulaman at recess. Or, he makes do with water from the water fountain and looks forward to lunch at home with family.

One toilet for 5,000 students

Inside the classroom, he squeezes himself in along with 49 other busy bodies in a space intended only for 30 kids. (A classroom in Quezon City has been extended by occupying the fire escape. In another area, the comfort room has been renovated to be the faculty room since the former faculty lounge has been converted into a classroom. The remaining toilet in a school with 5,000 students is strictly for girls; the boys do it along the fence at the back end of the school grounds.)

Our public school pupil will be fortunate to have six hours of learning. The elementary school in Payatas, reputed to be one of the most thickly populated public schools in the world, has been implementing four-hour shifts (6-10am, 10am-2pm, 2pm-6pm) to cope with the bloated demand.

In the face of what’s happening on the ground, issues such as a bridge Grade 7 preparatory to high school, or revising the curriculum to focus more on the three R’s—Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmetic—seems irrelevant. Overcrowded classrooms, overworked underpaid teachers, cases of graft and corruption, even petty fights in school are symptoms of a lingering malaise.

Education: A Pinoy's Tanging Yaman

As expected, government must bear a large part of the blame arising from its lopsided priorities and sheer lack of vision for the “fair hopes of the Fatherland.” The Constitution, the basic law of the land, provides the highest priority to education in the national budget. And yet annually, education ranks below the military and debt servicing in the budgetary allocation.

The framers of the Constitution must have understood what every Filipino parent tells a truant child: “Your education is the only lasting gift I’ll leave behind when I’m gone!”. The World Bank and the Asian Development, in their respective regular updates on the sector, agree that education is a key driver of social mobility and financial stability in the child’s future.

Except for the landed gentry, all decision makers from President Arroyo to the CEOs of top government agencies and private corporations proclaim themselves as educated individuals. The first worry of most job applicants is that their level of educational attainment may not be enough to land a good paying job. For most Filipinos, education is a crucial escape route out of the poverty trap.

Unfortunately, misplaced priorities and economic policies have distorted the primacy of education in building today a better future for the next generation. It has been estimated that if every Congressman pools his annual pork barrel into a common fund, the money will be enough to send a million out of school youths back to school for a year. Of course, our learned lawmakers would rather invest in their political future than give a second chance to a million disenfranchised youths who skipped school to fend for his family at a tender age.

The sputtering economy is contributing adversely to a faltering educational system. The lesser the economic activity, the lower the revenues to government and a decrease in allocation for non-revenue earning public services such as education. Managed by well-educated men and women, the Philippine economy has been on a downward slide after surviving the Gulf oil crisis in the ‘70s, the political turmoil of the mid-80s and he Asian financial meltdown of the late ‘90s. The continued mishandling begs the question: Does a failing economy lead to a failing education sector, or is it the other way around?

Computer Practice: 4 hours a year

The importance of basic education need not be underscored. Whether delivered by a public school or private institution, elementary education provides the building blocks for the future, particularly for the poor. However, the scores of the National Elementary Assessment Test or NEAT show that public elementary school graduates have the competency in science and math of Grade 4 pupils.

Now, the prophets of a better future are proclaiming our collective salvation via a new world economy propelled by information technology. So, computer technology will save the next generation. Good.

But something is still amiss for the public school pupil. For starters, the average Juanita may have a computer subject in her curriculum but she may be allowed no more than 4 hours a year to practice what he learned given the limited number of personal computers in most public schools. She’d likely get more practice from the neighborhood Internet café and that’s another challenge altogether.

In the fist place, what kind of competency will a public school graduate have to learn IT when he can barely do proper Math after 6 years of schooling? Sure, the future looks bright, but the poor pupil blinded by basic science and math, may not see its beneficial light.