LIGHT OF LEARNING

There's The Rub

LIGHT OF LEARNING
By Conrado de Quiros

Inquirer

Last updated 01:48am (Mla time) 06/07/2007
MANILA, Philippines --

Some of the stories were poignant.

An 11-year-old boy in the mountain town of Banaue was reading by a fire. No, not by a fireside but by a fire, in the open wilderness on a moonless night. The boy was one of a brood, and he was the one who most had problems reading. His parents and elder siblings were helping him improve and had built a fire using pine splinters as kindling. The boy held out a book against the flickering light and was plodding through the text. Asked why he was having difficulty reading, he said it was because the letters were small and he had poor eyesight.

You thought: The reading might improve, but the eyesight was going to get worse. But such was the dedication of the family to educating one of their own amid a mountain of adversity, bigger than the mountains around them, your heart went out to them.

The other stories told of the usual woes. Classrooms were in short supply, teachers were in short supply, books were in short supply, money was in short supply, and patience was in short supply. There was the usual supply of perfidy and malfeasance, hustling and conning. One elementary public school in the depressed area of Payatas in Quezon City was charging a fee from enrollees worth P200 that wasn’t sanctioned by the Department of Education. The principal would later say that fee was purely optional, and was more in the nature of a donation than anything else. A toothless driver would say not so, his son was refused admission because he couldn’t pay it.

Every time school opens, you get scenes like this that make you laugh and cry, praise and decry. But for the most part, that gets you depressed, making you wonder where this country is going. If anything speaks of the fragileness of our future, this is it. The opening of classes is supposed to fill you with a sense of uplift, of minds being opened and enlightenment planted there amid the bedlam of traffic and tribulation of rain and flood. The opening of our classes gives you only a sense of drift, of a country desperately trying to survive, of the poor hoping against hope that being able to read and write, count and account all the way to graduation will, somehow, give them a crack at finding a job. Preferably abroad, as an overseas Filipino worker.

The contrast with other countries, not least our immediate neighbors, is glaring. In their capitals at least, kids in neat uniforms are bundled off in cars or school buses or trains on their way to impregnable schoolhouses. It’s the most moving thing in the world to see a kid struggling by wood fire to make sense of the jumble of letters in a book -- it might as well be hieroglyphics -- but you also get to wonder how that kid is going to compete later on with another kid who is even now sitting on a desk with a PC monitor in front of him, and roving the Internet. In other Asian countries, the computer to student ratio in high school at least is 1:1. Indeed, the whole spectacle of a country struggling to pull itself up by its bootstraps, the boots worn out at the end and the toes of the wearer peeping out of them, is inspiring, but you also get to wonder how it is going to fare later on in a global environment where competition is as fierce as gladiatorial combat.

More than anything, it’s the opening of classes that drives home to me the point about what corruption means. Corruption by itself holds little meaning; it is an abstraction. Particularly when the sums reach millions -- not to speak of billions -- the mind is unable to grasp the enormity of it. Even saying that corruption is thievery, that corruption is pillage, that corruption is stealing, doesn’t quite get the message across. All people get is the image of public officials enriching themselves on taxes which, in this country, mean nothing more or less than tribute, the kind vassals give to their liege.

The opening of our classes shows the sinews, the bones, the flesh and blood of corruption. Indeed, the state of our education drives home the taste, the smell, the sights and sounds of corruption. You get to see what corruption really means in what you see and hear this week -- or what you don’t see and hear this week. Corruption is taking away:
It is the classroom with the aluminum roof and fortified walls that should be there but is not there, which is why teacher and students are out there in the open, besieged by wind and rain. It is the books and pencils and crayons that should be there but are not there; only grimy kids in shirts with the faces of candidates fading away are there, wiping off the sleep from their eyes, waiting for the first shift to finish so they can have their turn at the classrooms. It is the shouts of joy and expectation and the smell of new clothes and rosy hopes that should be there but aren’t there, only the bedraggled groans of those whose summers have ended or the sighs of relief of those who get a respite from scavenging or foraging for food. Or so in the public schools, which is where most of this country’s kids go.

Corruption isn’t just drowning in bills flung into the air over one’s bed, which is how it is in the movies, though I know one congressman who did that quite literally to know how it felt to be filthy rich, emphasis on filthy. It is taking away. It is grabbing the scraps of food from the table of the hungry. It is seizing the jeepney money of a Grade 2 kid, forcing him to walk in frayed rubber slippers in the smoldering heat or raging flood, through fetid sidewalks and semen-smelling alleys, to the decrepit structure that is a light in a storm-tossed sea. It is holding up this country’s future the way holdup men (who are often dismissed or active enlisted men) hold up banks, gunning down poorly paid security guards without pity or thought.

Each time a school year starts, I wonder who needs education more badly. Our kids, or our public officials?