A Nation Robbed of Its Future: Reflection on Philippine Education

A Nation Robbed of Its Future: Reflection on Philippine Education

She is 21 years old, still in freshman year of high school. She can read, but she doesn’t understand a thing.
He is 17 years old. He can’t read, which makes comprehension next to impossible. The oldest in a 2nd grade class of 60, none of the nine year old kids want to talk to him, want to sit next to him. He is ostracized.
She is 9 years old, and is taking 1st grade for the 3rd time. She wakes up before the sun rises to run to the nearest wet market, scavenge fallen vegetables that still seem edible, and serve to a family of 8. She is 9 years old and she hardly sleeps at night from all the work, and school in between.
A wise man Jose Rizal once said, “The children are our future”. But these children don’t even have futures of their own. How can they carry the weight of the next generation’s hope for a better tomorrow? They themselves don’t even have a better tomorrow.
In the Philippines, only a mere 3% of the children who get elementary education are eligible to move on to high school education. In the Philippines, more than 20 million students will troop to elementary schools and face an astounding 80,000-classroom shortage. In the Philippines, there is a 50,000 public school teacher shortage. It is not just an opinion that the education in the Philippines has dramatically dropped from its once great education system, ranking somewhere around 45 out of 47 countries in math and science today. It is a fact. What ever happened to the right of every child to proper education?
Education is suppose to open doors of opportunities, create choices and options for the future, equip us with tools that will be essential to survive decently in the world. If anyone is robbed off of this, he denied his right to choose the future he dreams of for himself, he is denied opportunities of a better life that would otherwise be opened for him.
These children, these poor boys and girls who have no choice but to skip school this year because the funds can barely cover...

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