College not required

By Emmanuelle

The average no-nonsense Filipino does not ask for too much: a decent job with a monthly take-home pay as near to equal as that of Hong Kong or the Middle East. The wife and kids are fed, clothed, properly housed; the children are educated; the family is happy, safe under one roof at sunset to sun-up. No one leaves for overseas work; no one is brought home from overseas work as repatriates by planeloads, on stretchers or wheelchairs, or stiffly cold in wooden boxes.

It is not a dream; it is not even a foolish wish. It had been done before; it prevails still now. Not here, though. There, in highly-developed, economically superior countries 

But then, why not here? Desperate situations demand desperate actions. And what is more desperate and disparate than now?

In this country, a decent job means a college diploma. And with the present state of the nation, the real state of the nation, the capacity to provide for college withdraws farther and farther from a parent’s grasp. In the inverted pyramid, only 10% are rich, the middle class has disappeared, and all the rest are poor. And sadly, the average college graduate fails to pass employment standards of industries that may still have more than adequate room for vacancies. The college graduate does not speak or write passable English, does not solve or compute as fast and correctly as expected, does not have skills to operate the simplest of the modern industrial machineries.

In the United States of America, and other countries ranked likewise in terms of industrial and economic achievability, college had become so expensive as to be considered a luxury of choice. Their government and their people learned to accept this state of affairs as both bane and boon.

A bane, as college (and postgraduate, doctorate, and the long-termed courses in the medical field, law, etc.) evolved to an option available only to the privileged – the moneyed, those with foresight to save as early as before the kids even start to arrive, the very resourceful and determined, the cerebrally-gifted, etc.

A boon, as legislators, the state administrators and the people learned to live with and around this initial stumbling block to continuing education. They had an excellent and an early head start to their credit; brain-drain had not depleted their country of the intellectuals to do the thinking, of lawmakers to effect laws into programs for the people, of supervisors to oversee implementation of these programs, of managers to maintain the programs. They designed and developed a system of popular elementary and secondary education that equipped the high school graduate with sufficient knowledge and training to get himself employed, financially independent, self-sustained. One does not need to go further to college to be considered literate and job-eligible. One does not need the college diploma to free himself from bondage to poverty and ignorance.

Jobs got to be filled in by high school graduates armed only with their diplomas and ten to twelve years of comprehensive, intensively thought-of, well-planned and efficiently implemented elementary and secondary education. More than good enough to land a fresh eighteen year -old  clerical, sales, banking, technical, vocational, basic tutorial, public relations and even a successful entrepreneurship in agriculture and business.          

Where to get the money to finance the initial research towards converting giant traditional machinery into this system of popular education?

Recently, a Chinese-Filipino businessman donated 10.5B on his birthday to the Philippine government, specifically destined for the cash-strapped Department of Education.

Please don’t let this generous endowment of the heart disappear into the Super Regions of the Nevernever Land.

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