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| Photo from NY Times |
With the country’s PCR-based mass testing capacity not even
available to all our workers, opening our schools this coming August is not
only unsafe for our children but will also be very costly when alternative
learning modalities are applied. The case of infected South Korean students and
our own poor pandemic response raise many red flags on this issue.
First, on mass testing. Without the vaccine and our mass
testing capacity stuck at minimal level, sending their children to school is a
choice which is exceedingly difficult to decide for poor families who cannot
even get free mass testing and adequate subsidies to secure their own health
and economic survival at home. On the other hand, not enrolling when schools
officially open in August places unnecessary pressure on both parents and
students whose dreams of getting out of the poverty trap the soonest time
possible through education remain high despite the pandemic.
Second, on transportation. The government did not even make
provisions of shuttle services for their employees mandatory to all employers.
Students from poor families rely on public transport and we see them battered
daily by the violence of our mass transportation system. Adjusting to the new
and reduced capacity of our mass transport system will further expose children
and their mothers to more hazards. On the other hand, requiring them to be
shuttled by service vehicles which rates are more expensive is too much of a
burden for parents whose economic future are threatened by manifold crises due
to this pandemic.
Third, on the physical setup. Our overcrowded schools need
to be re-modelled first to ensure physical distancing and we have not yet seen
any plan on how to do this in the remaining few weeks. Will it mean dividing
the number of sections and classes and therefore extending the working hours of
our teachers?
Fourth, on alternative learning modalities. E-learning or
distance learning is a sound idea as long as the infrastructure for it is ready
and universally accessible to all students of all classes, public and private.
In fact, the time for distance learning has come several years earlier than the
pandemic but it did only serve a privileged class of students enrolled in high
end universities. Private schools may
continue to offer this mode for capable students but for public schools, a
universal online modality remains a wishful thinking at this point in time. To
our knowledge, even our premier state university, the University of the
Philippines, did not make online classes mandatory during the lockdown period
because not all UP students and teachers have gadgets and access to reliable
internet.
This online class divide can only be resolved if the state
will provide free internet services to all barangays and online gadgets are
made affordable to all households. Unfortunately, our national broadband
capacity embedded in the power transmission lines is now under the control of
the Chinese-run National Grid Corporation of the Philippines. To maximize its
free use for educational purposes, the transmission system has to be
re-nationalized, notwithstanding many other issues supporting the argument for
its renationalization.
Education as a social good must be made universally
accessible to all, including the new and advance systems of learning
modalities. Otherwise, without system and infrastructure reforms, Philippine
education in times of pandemics will stay as a model itself of social
inequality that infected this nation for over a century now.
25 May 2020
