Literacy Declining : Philippines: New Crisis in Education

Last year, U.S. taxpayers spent $15,000 to build a three-room school in the remote barrio of Luneta in this central Philippine town.

The modern schoolhouse--part of a $62-million U.S. aid program that has erected thousands of schools throughout the Philippines since 1980--was to have housed more than 100 elementary school children, three teachers and enough teaching aids to provide a state-of-the-art education.

But at the Luneta school last week, there were only 17 pupils. There were no teachers, no books, no electricity, although the school nurse tried to teach one class. And for three months before that, there were no pupils either.

Afraid to Teach

With a guerrilla war raging in the surrounding mountains and armed government vigilantes manning checkpoints along the jungle path leading to the barrio, the teachers have been afraid to teach here this year.

But it hardly matters.

In the tiny huts that house the 2,000 people of the Luneta barrio, poverty is so crushing that most of the children are too weak or sick from malnutrition to come and learn. Some cannot even afford clothes to wear to school. And even many of the healthy children are not allowed to attend, since their parents consider them far more valuable as laborers in the rice fields.

“There has been no real school here since July 15,” said barrio chief Nemesio Hecto, 49. “And now we look at a future without education for our children--without the education that even we parents had. Without education, the future is now very, very dark.”

And so it is throughout the Philippines.

Illiteracy and Ignorance

Nationwide, millions of Filipino children in thousands of barrios like Luneta share that future of illiteracy, of ignorance and--despite tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid--of no hope for the same quality of education their parents received.

Twenty years ago, the Philippines ranked as the second-best-educated nation in Asia. Today, after nearly two decades of governmental neglect and corruption so massive that it has left the Philippines an impoverished nation, the educational levels in a country that once boasted nearly universal literacy now rank just ahead of Bangladesh.

At a time when its Asian neighbors are becoming wealthier, healthier and wiser, the Philippines and its major institutions are deteriorating, and there are few examples as stark as education.

In short, the 30 million Filipinos now under the age of 16--more than half the country’s total population--represent what many experts predict will be a lost generation.

In many ways, the crisis in public education here is yet another legacy of the discredited, 20-year regime of deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos. But the continuing crisis also serves as one of the most dramatic illustrations of inefficiency, bureaucratic indifference and social stagnation under the cash-strapped government of President Corazon Aquino.

Nowhere are the reasons for that reversal more clear than in public elementary education--the 1st through 6th grades, where the basic pillars of Philippine education have now all but collapsed.

Administrators Frustrated

To determine the depth and causes of what is quickly becoming one of the world’s most startling reversals of national literacy, The Times spent months visiting scores of rural elementary schools and interviewing dozens of frustrated schoolteachers, school district administrators, education department bureaucrats, parents, planners and international aid officials.

Among the findings:

-- In a nation that once enjoyed rural literacy rates of more than 95%, less than 85% of all Filipinos can now read. What is worse, in most rural school districts, the majority of all pupils are now dropping out before they can read even local dialects, and some studies project that in just 10 years, when the nation’s literate elders die and a new illiterate generation comes of age, less than half the Philippine population may be able to read in any language.

-- Already, just 40% of all pupils who enter the first grade finish high school. More than one-third drop out before they enter the sixth grade, and only 8 in every 100 pupils who enter primary school ever get to college--a startling statistic, considering that past Philippine generations have produced, per capita, more doctors, lawyers, scientists and researchers than any other nation in Asia. The government concedes that more than 3 million Filipino schoolchildren already have dropped out.

-- The majority of the nation’s rural, elementary school classrooms have only one textbook for every four pupils, meaning that the children spend most evenings with nothing to study. Many schools have no textbooks at all, and teachers, lacking even blackboards and chalk, must instruct with their hands.

-- Nearly half of a $100-million World Bank loan originally earmarked for printing new textbooks is being squandered on “value-formation seminars” for teachers, who say the seminars are worthless in classrooms that have no books and no desks. And the distribution of the World Bank-funded books was delayed for more than a year while the Aquino government meticulously expunged all textbook references to Marcos. The books still have not reached the schools; printing delays are blamed.

-- In most school districts, there are either too few desks and chairs or none at all. Children sit on dirt floors, often in classrooms without ceilings. In many other rural districts, there are too few schools and classrooms to begin with. Classes are held in churches, private homes and sometimes under trees in schoolyards.

-- A $62-million U.S. Agency for International Development project to build 2,316 fully equipped elementary schools has ended up as little more than a public works project--and, in some cases, a badly executed one. Many local contractors took shortcuts in building the classrooms; pipes have burst, toilets have exploded and roofs leak. Decisions on placement of the schools were either political or random, putting too many classrooms in barrios controlled by ruling politicians and leaving opposition barrios with too few. In addition, all the U.S.-built schools lack books, and some of them, like the Luneta school, were built in war-infested villages where the teachers are afraid to teach.

-- Nearly a fifth of the nation’s 32,000 elementary schools have been closed at least once this year because of fighting between the Communist insurgents and the government military. In many rural barrios, classes have been canceled for months at a time when local military and village officials converted the schools into makeshift refugee centers for residents evacuated from barrios where the military is operating. And dozens of teachers have cited what they call “the peace and order situation” as the principal enemy of education.

‘Not Education at All’

“All in all, when you look at the level of elementary education in our country today, what is going on is not education at all,” said Ben Segovia, national chairman of the 70,000-member Alliance of Concerned Teachers labor union.

“It is a parody of education. It is a national tragedy. And I’m afraid it isn’t getting any better under the present administration,” Segovia added.

Most officials in Aquino’s Department of Education concede that they are presiding over a national disaster, but, unlike critics such as Segovia, they insist that Marcos is entirely to blame.

“Marcos single-handedly destroyed education in this country,” said Victor Ordonez, under secretary for education, culture and sports. “He raped its budget, and he ruined its teachers.”

Marcos Slashed Budget

In fact, Marcos did slash the budget for national education when he declared martial law in 1972. The allocation for school construction, teachers, desks and books went from more than a third of the total national budget to just 9% in 1972, and the bulk of it was transferred to the military.

Marcos’ budget cuts ended a long tradition of education as a first priority in the Philippines. Even the most hardened Filipino nationalists concede that education was the single most valuable contribution made here by American colonists, who governed the Philippines’ 7,100 islands as a territory from 1898 until 1946.

Not even World War II, which left the Philippines scarred and broke, destroyed that tradition.

“Before the war, I was brought up on one book for every student,” said Felix Santos, who is now Aquino’s assistant Cabinet secretary for educational planning.

Schoolhouses Destroyed

“During the war, we lost all of our books. Most of our schoolhouses were destroyed in the bombing. But our teachers never lost that sense of mission to teach, the pupils never lost their desire to learn and the parents never thought of pulling kids out of school to work.”

After the war, many of the schools were rebuilt and the books replaced with U.S. war-reparations money. Even Marcos, during his first presidential term between 1964 and 1968, launched a massive U.S.-funded textbook printing and distribution program. But in each of those textbooks, paragraphs were inserted venerating Marcos and his wife, Imelda. Most educators see that as the beginning of an attempt by the now-deposed dictator to use the educational system to create a personality cult around the ruling family.

Raises and Elections

Later, Marcos cut education funding to the bone, exempting only the salaries of the teachers, who, in the Philippines, are also charged with conducting elections and referendums.

After 1972, Education Department officials now say, there was virtually no money for textbooks or for building, maintenance or equipment.

“This was really just a survival department for many years,” Under Secretary Ordonez said.

As the national economy deteriorated through the late 1970s and early ‘80s, a period during which Aquino government investigators allege that the Marcoses and their cronies stole as much as $10 billion from the national treasury, even the teachers’ salaries suffered.

“The teachers were being treated shabbily, and they lost their sense of mission,” said Adriano Arcelo, another under secretary in the Education Department.

‘Second-Class Citizens’

“When the economy got really bad in the early 1980s, the teachers began to feel like second-class citizens,” Arcelo said. “The powerful, prestige jobs were all in the military. And then Marcos signed a decree allowing teachers to moonlight to augment their income. Classes in many places were cut to a half-day so the teachers could go off to their second jobs.

“That missionary zeal of being a teacher is now gone,” Arcelo continued. “A lot of them just aren’t dedicated anymore. We have enough teachers in this country--my God, there are 20,000 qualified teachers on the waiting list looking for jobs. The problem is motivating them.”

But the problem is not just economic.

‘Cult of Fear’

“The Marcos martial-law period has done something irreversible in our school system--especially in the minds of the teachers and school administrators,” said teachers’ union chairman Segovia. “It was not just a cult of personality; it was a cult of fear and of mindlessness.

“You were not supposed to think. You were not supposed to contest. You were not supposed to question. You were supposed to follow, to implement and to obey. This cannot be repaired. With that kind of outlook, there’s no hope.”

Nonetheless, bureaucrats such as Arcelo say the Aquino government is making an attempt to restore the teachers’ zeal.

Seminars for Educators

Using nearly half of a $100-million World Bank loan to finance meals, transportation and boarding for all 390,000 of the nation’s primary school teachers, the government is sponsoring a series of one-week “value reformation” seminars for teachers and administrators nationwide.

Without exception, though, dozens of teachers interviewed throughout the country said the seminars are a waste of time and money.

“When we are in the seminar, it seems like it’s making a lot of sense, but when we go back into our classrooms, we are facing the same children with ragged clothes and empty stomachs, the same classrooms with no books, the same schoolhouses with no ceilings,” said Marilyn Gad, a fifth-grade teacher at the remote Roxas Elementary School in the town of Basey on Samar, the Philippines’ most impoverished island.

“There is a change inside us when we are in the seminar, but after we come back, we change back into what we were.”

Teachers Underpaid

The nation’s teachers are still underpaid; their base salary, even after a 50% raise this year, is $80 a month. Nevertheless, many of them, like those at the broken-down and crumbling Roxas school, have shown extraordinary creativity in making the most out of what little they have.

For example, Raymund Macalalad Sr., Roxas’ science teacher, built a functioning microscope out of scrap wood and junk, fashioning an eyepiece from a piece of bamboo, a lens from a broken toy camera, a mirror from a discarded woman’s compact and the wood from the school’s ancient, discarded desks. And he built a globe out of bent wire, empty cement sacks and papier-mache, then painted the world map on the surface.

” . . . how often it strikes me how outstanding a job the teachers do with what little they have,” Under Secretary Ordonez noted.

Moribund Bureaucracy

On the national level, the education bureaucracy, like that of many of Aquino’s departments for the past 20 months, appears moribund.

Most of the government’s regional and district education officials rarely visit the rural schools, preferring to remain at their desks in urban centers. In many school districts where schoolhouses have been destroyed by typhoons or there is a teacher shortage because of deaths or retirements, mayors complain that regional education officials have been unresponsive.

“My town has been short 11 teachers and six classrooms for more than two years,” said Mayor Alfredo Galan, whose town of Carmen is located in the center of the island of Bohol, nearly 100 miles from the nearest regional capital. “No one even comes here to see.”

Inefficient Administrators

Education Planning Secretary Santos conceded that many regional, provincial and district-level administrators are inefficient. “They are over-educated,” he said. “Many have masters’ or doctoral degrees. They feel the job is beneath them. It’s a motivation problem.”

Sources in the Education Department, requesting anonymity, said the continuing problems in education begin at the top. According to these sources, Aquino’s Cabinet secretary for education, Lourdes Quisumbing, has focused her efforts on purging the cult of Marcos from textbooks and removing his portrait from classrooms and, they say, has neglected the schools, teachers and pupils themselves.

Quisumbing could not be reached for comment. She was out of the country for nearly a month this fall, traveling to Rome for the canonization of the first Filipino saint, attending a U.N. conference in Paris and touring China. Her office referred several calls from The Times to Under Secretaries Arcelo and Ordonez.

Massive Problems

The education problems here are of such scope, according to independent observers, that neither a streamlined bureaucracy nor a massive infusion of money is likely to make much difference.

“The fundamental problem here is the overpopulation,” said Fred Schieck, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Manila. “The growth rate is 2.7%. The Education Department says the school population is growing by 4% every year. I don’t care what you do, that problem isn’t going to go away.”

Schieck defended the lack of effectiveness of the U.S. government’s massive school-building project by saying it was never conceived as an education project.

“It was a public works project,” he said, adding that agency officials decided to use the aid money to build schools in 1980 because it was the only project that would satisfy both the Marcoses’ demands and those of U.S. congressmen who were concerned that Marcos would squander the money.

Sites Selected by Marcos

“We offered many times to use the (aid money) to buy textbooks, but the government always refused,” Schieck said, adding that the selection of sites for the school buildings was left to the Philippine government.

“The tragedy, of course, is that any observer of this scene here has to recognize that education is, indeed, deteriorating in this country. . . . Institutions that were so supreme in the past are breaking down.”

Perhaps nowhere else is the imagery of that deterioration more graphic than in the “school library” of the Roxas elementary school on Samar.

Only One Textbook

There is only one textbook in the barren library. There are no chairs, no desks, no tables and only a handful of crumbling, 10-year-old American magazines. The lone textbook in a battered cabinet in the corner of the library is entitled “English for Grade III,” and, on the first page, it bears the following message from then-President Marcos:

“The development of the minds of young people like you means the development of our nation, for the educated youth of today will be the creative, dynamic and enlightened leaders of tomorrow.”

A visiting Times reporter noted the irony of the message to one of the local teachers and asked why the regional and national education offices had failed for so many years to send any new textbooks.

“Oh, we did get new textbooks just last week,” replied one teacher. “There were 83 of them. They came from the Asia Foundation. But we can’t use them. They’re for college level only.”