Jose Carillo's Forum

EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM

Open Forum: The state of education and teaching in the Philippines

This open forum aims to help find ways to develop a better-taught, much better-educated Philippine citizenry. You are invited to freely post here your opinions, perceptions, ideas, observations, suggestions, and experiences about education and teaching in the Philippines. Of course, you are also most welcome to post a response to any of the postings.

There is no firm limit to the length of postings in this open forum, but to keep the discussions manageable, a range of 100 to 1,500 words is suggested. Please confine your postings largely to your own views, knowledge, and experience. If you need to cite long references or background material on the web, just send the links to us and the Forum webmaster will take care of setting up the links with the sites you have indicated.

While openness is encouraged when giving your views, please keep the discussions in the open forum civil at all times. The open forum will be closely moderated, and postings with abusive or vituperative language will be stricken off outright.

Join me in looking forward to lively and enlightening discussions in this forum!

Joe Carillo

Initial consensus: Philippine education and teaching need a sweeping overhaul

During its first week, our special forum on “The State of Education and Teaching in the Philippines” elicited a stark picture of the problems besetting a particular public high-school in the Philippines, brought to the fore the need for science and solid research as a foundation for Philippine education reform, and a started off a lively exchange on the advisability of Wikipedia as a source reference for Philippine textbooks.

We invite you to join the forum and share your ideas, insights, perceptions, aspirations, experiences, and feelings about these very crucial aspects of our national life. As I said in an earlier posting in this Forum, who knows how much value-added your views might contribute to honest-to-goodness education reform in our country?

Below are the postings that are now being discussed in the Forum. Please feel free to respond to any of these postings or to open a new posting of your own.

Do let us hear from you!

Tonybau, a medical doctor and former PTA president, paints a bleak scenario of overcrowding, teacher overload and lack of qualified teachers, lack of basic facilities like clean water and libraries, and malnutrition among pupils in his city’s public high school. He then advocates a total overhaul of the educational system that “continues to churn out students, majority of [whom] are products of an environment where teachers are there only to earn their keep.”

Florlaca, a retired university professor and department head with a master’s in zoology and a doctorate in comparative endocrinology, vigorously proposes that improving research performance is essential to real academic reform. He says that publications that meet internationally accepted criteria are the best indicator of research performance and of competence to do other academic work as well. We still have to hear a response to this from academe or from education officials.

Arvin Ortiz, a student-writer, points out that while some professors consider Wikipedia as an unreliable source for students’ research papers and theses, some PhDs in the Philippines have actually cited Wikipedia as a source for the textbooks they have written. What gives?

Penmanila, creative writing institute director and English professor at the University of the Philippines, notes that teachers of English in the Philippines have such a weak command of the English language themselves, and wonders how their English can be improved. He asks: Do seminars and things of that sort really help?

Madgirl109, who describes herself as “just another struggling Filipino worker in Japan,” gives a first-hand view of the problems and opportunities of Filipinos working in Japan. For them to improve their job and income prospects in Japan, she says, they need to become more proficient not only in English but in Nihongo as well.

Meikah, who used to be a university instructor but now works as a web education professional, believes that education and teaching in the country have gotten from bad to worse. She says college students lack comprehension skills because their teachers in grade school and high school had made no effort at all to help them understand or teach them how to understand their lessons.

Maudionisio says that to foist the myth of “one nation, one language,” the Philippine government massively brainwashed elementary pupils in the 1960s to think that the national language was Pilipino, and that the other languages spoken by Filipinos in the other regions were simply dialects. He contends that this brainwashing has not been undone, so some of those pupils—now grown up—still erroneously refer to the various Philippine languages as “dialects.”

Click to read the complete individual postings and to post your response

 




Copyright © 2009 by Aperture Web Development. All rights reserved.

Page best viewed with:

Mozilla FirefoxGoogle Chrome

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!

Page last modified: 12 September, 2009, 3:00 a.m.