A country of immense and largely unseen failures
By Juan T. Gatbonton, The Manila Times
 
The Jesuit educator, Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, describes government’s neglect of elementary education as “our immense and largely invisible failure.” The fact is that education is not the only basic chore we’ve forgotten to look after. We are a country of immense and largely invisible failures: Our nation is like the proverbial frog inside the kettle on the stove—swimming blithely in water that is coming to a boil.

In recent years, our history had been made up of one quiet crisis after another. In basic education, as the Philippine Human Development Report (2008 to 2009) of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) tells it: “Out of 100 children who enter Grade 1, only 86 move on to Grade 2; 76 to Grade 4; 67 to Grade 6; and only 65 complete their (six-year) elementary education.

“Of these 65, only 58 go on to high school, of whom 42 graduate four years later. Hence the completion rate for basic education is less than 50 percent.”

Meanwhile, pupils’ achievement levels are “alarmingly” and “pathetically” low. Only 15.3 percent of elementary schools crossed the 75 percent level—the required minimum competency for the next level of schooling—in the 2006 National Achievement Test.

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Specialist pleading

By Frank Furedi, The Australian

One of the most influential contemporary cultural myths is that our era is characterised by the end of deference.

Commentators interpret the declining influence of traditional authority and institutions as proof that people have become less deferential and possess more critical attitudes than in the past. However, it is less frequently noted that deference to traditional authority has given way to the reverence of expertise.

Western culture assumes that a responsible individual will defer to the opinion of an expert. Politicians frequently remind us that their policies are "evidence based", which usually means informed by expert advice. Experts have the last word on topics of public interest and increasingly on matters to do with people's private affairs. We are advised to seek and heed to advice of a bewildering chorus of personal experts -- parenting specialists, life coaches, relationship gurus, super-nannies and sex therapists, to name a few -- who apparently possess the authority to tell us how to live our lives.

The exhortation to defer to experts is underpinned by the premise that their specialist knowledge entitles them to a higher moral status to the rest of us.

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