Shortchanging excelling schools

By Ermin Garcia Jr.

Something is very wrong with a policy of the Professional Regulation Commission, particularly the Board of Nursing, in evaluating the quality of education offered by nursing schools across the country.

For reasons known only to those who insist on the ridiculous policy of lumping the performance of fresh graduates with repeaters and long-overdue examinees of any school of nursing, the policy smacks of bias against established older schools in the country.

A case in point is the average determined for Lyceum-Northwestern University in Dagupan City. Its fresh graduates (Class 2008) accomplished a feat by delivering a 100% passing rate. That would have given our alumni of the university enough reason to exult and celebrate the batch’s achievement. But to their chagrin and utter disappointment, PRC decided LNU deserved a 25% passing rate!

How did that happen? The performance of LNU past graduates who failed previously and those who finally decided to take their chances with today’s exams for the first time were put into the equation! This was like saying that freshly baked apple pies by bakers who used fresh apples can’t taste any better than the pies by bakers who used rotten and over-ripe apples, all because the same oven was used to bake them!

This formula being used by the PRC undermines the very core of quality education. Any school that’s worth its salt can only and must be measured by its recent performance in delivering quality education, and this must be stated as such for the benefit of parents and prospective students. That’s how the universities all over the world are rated today for how else will one determine which school is the best today if one cannot be made to appreciate the latest performance, as an indicator of how a school presently train and equip its students. Even a summa cum laude 10 years ago cannot compare with the output of today’s summa cum laude under an entirely new environment.

The relevance and import of quality education is about the present and future, never about the past.

It is imperative, therefore, that all colleges and universities that made solid imprints in the country in the field of education collaborate today to correct this great injustice to education centers, parents and students.

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THE MEN DECIDE, THE WOMEN SUFFER. The country today is embroiled in an emotional debate over population growth and control, and the methods applicable for a predominantly Catholic Asian country like ours.

While we debate the contentious issues on how the population can be curbed proportionate to the country’s economic growth, everything is factored on the woman’s fertility and responsibility. The Catholic Church’s teaching imposes rhythm method or abstention for the woman as the natural and only acceptable form of contraception. The government and its leaders, on the other hand, are prescribing more artificial alternatives focusing on women’s options for contraception in order to drastically cut the runaway population growth.

The woman. Just the woman. The men on both sides are still deciding how the woman should manage her fertility, yet little is said about the responsibility of man in relating to the woman’s fertility.

The woman is expected to learn how to count her menstrual cycle, when and how to take pills, or apply other methods. And when the woman becomes pregnant, the woman is either praised for the timeliness or blamed for the ill-timing. If the pregnancy is deemed unwanted, the woman is asked why she had sex with her husband (or lover) without protecting herself.

Even sex education in any forum is still focused on the importance of understanding the female’s reproductive organ. The pressure continuously builds and falls on the woman.

Poor woman.

And as the national debate becomes more emotional by the day, I have yet to listen to a group (except the condom-makers) that focuses on the role and responsibility of men relating to their own fertility and their responsibility to the women they love and desire.

Stories of domestic/wife abuse abound to this day because the abusive husbands are singly aware of only one marital right – the right to possess the wife’s body and mind, anytime! Without the husband imposing himself, there could be no pregnancy, only a fertile woman.

And I wish I have sociologists to affirm my hypothesis that it is usually the drunken macho husband who causes millions of unwanted and unscheduled pregnancies, particularly among poor couples. The fact that poor families in the country average 4-7 children should attest to this.

Then, most teenagers today are simply taught or warned about unwanted teenage pregnancies with emphasis on the need for girls’ to be on the lookout for the sex crazed boys. Young boys, on the other hand, are simply warned by parents about possibly being trapped into marriage and little is said about need to control their urges and manifest respect for the girls they admire and desire.

It’s time the government and, yes, the religious sect begin to focus on the men’s role in curbing population not as policymakers but as the ones responsible for a woman’s pregnancy. It’s time the health benefits or risks and morality of male masturbation, vasectomy and the use of condom are squarely discussed very much in the same context that the woman’s options are discussed today. (Even the semantics applied that condom has to be used for protection against AIDS does not help the situation).

Effort must now be made to make the Filipino male understand not only the woman’s reproductive organ and system but the need to learn to be responsible for the woman’s reproductive organ as well.

But even on this issue, I surmise that the conflict between government and the Church will continue. Never mind, but at least a debate on this will help increase awareness for men to understand and respect women’s bodies and rights, and yes, their responsibility for the women’s pregnancies.

(Readers may reach columnist at punch.sunday@gmail.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/punchline/
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