©Salonga
Philippine education has emerged into a new normal that has yet to take form after two years of being among the last countries across the globe to resume full-time and in-person learning. According to Abhijit Banerjee, co-chair of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), learning losses due to school closures pose one of the biggest global threats to medium and long-term recovery from COVID-19. United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Philippine Representative Oyunsaikhan Dendevnorov stated that many children are bound to encounter the associated consequences of school closures—learning loss, mental distress, missed vaccinations, heightened risk of dropout, child labor, and child marriage.
In an attempt to mitigate these losses, the Department of Education (DepEd) intends to ban extracurricular activities for the school year 2022-2023. In light of the reopening of classes in August, Vice President and DepEd Secretary Sara Duterte announced that traditional school activities would not push through this academic year. Instead, she encouraged teachers to focus on academics which poses a deep misunderstanding of the nuances that lie beyond the iceberg that is COVID-19, education, learning loss, and the Philippines.
The DepEd fails to understand the depth of the country’s educational crisis, addressing academic recovery at the very surface level—if not creating even more learning losses. Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Chairman Vladimer Quetua pushed that the DepEd’s plans to ban extracurricular activities are rooted in a “narrow framework that loss in learning can be recovered through more intensive and greater hours of academic study.”
At its very core, the goal of basic education encompasses providing the school-age population and young adults with the skills, knowledge, and values to become caring, self-reliant, productive, and patriotic citizens. It is a multi-dimensional experience that extends beyond the four walls of the classroom. Article XIV Section 2(1) of the 1987 Constitution states that the State shall “establish, maintain, and support a complete, adequate, and integrated system of education relevant to the needs of the people and society.” How can our educational stakeholders hold such confidence in the education that is complete, adequate, and integrated while simultaneously taking away an element in education that allows students to integrate their learnings in different contexts and provides them the room to learn more about themselves?
In discourse surrounding education, the “factory classroom” or “factory model school” are commonly referenced to describe K-12 education, an analogy that parallels this type of learning with industrial-age factories—drawing similarities from the classroom physical structure, the nature of academic activities, and the products of learning. Students are seated and arranged in neat and orderly rows, confined within a classroom of four walls as long banks of fluorescent lights hang above them. The walls are plain white. They act according to a tight schedule with time frames dedicated for them to eat their meals; they do not eat at work. They work together on the same things at the same time. While this takes place, they are tasked to turn in products of learning judged according to a universal standard.
However, one of the only things that keep our education from being completely void of life is the care brought by educators into the system — the inherent curiosity of students, and their efforts to resist what our systems enable learning to become. There is laughter in one classroom from an anecdote of a teacher, and students file their chairs all the way to the side of their rooms to hold programs in celebration of events such as Teachers’ Day or an annual Christmas party. Fruitful learning takes place first and foremost with the meticulousness of a lesson plan, the animatedness a teacher allows their students to witness, or the innate creativity of students when given the room to bloom. However, we need a system that brings out the best of this, instead of discouraging and prohibiting growth.
Education exceeds the acquisition and reinforcement of knowledge since it is also a cultural process that bridges us to our roots and allows us to understand our context. It is a student’s first reckoning with the world outside the classroom; it allows students to understand their roots while equipping them with the skills to bloom in themselves and into the world. Studies regard extracurriculars as a channel for reinforcing lessons acquired in the classroom by giving students the opportunity to apply academic skills in a real-world context, thus providing them with a well-rounded education. Our learners need these avenues to ease the stress and tension brought by the health crisis, as well as to meet opportunities in the form of guidance from coaches and interaction with peers who share the same interests.
Apart from this, it is also essential to understand what it truly means to address learning loss, especially within the context of the losses that prevailed before and during COVID-19—the classroom shortage, alleged corruption behind the overpriced but outdated laptops for teachers, academic load, dismal salaries, and lack of teaching personnel. Instead of opting to ban extracurricular activities in hopes that it would alleviate the ails that have run deep throughout the years on both ends of teachers and students, the DepEd must take responsibility for the long-standing problems of a broken system by meeting it where it stands.
Valerie Strauss claims schools represent gardens more than they resemble factories, “...and great gardens aren’t the result of modernist design or entrepreneurial innovation. They are products of attention, devotion, and love. They are complex systems that demand our time and respond to our care. And in a thousand different blooms, they reward us with their beauty.”
More than anything, education is a human system with human needs. It responds to the care we offer and evolves in the direction of our efforts. This is what we demand from our educational stakeholders, especially our officials mandated by the state who hold the means, the responsibility, and the resources to act on decisions for the welfare of our students and educators—we simply demand that you care enough, that these positions are accounted for with effort, with the understanding that stems from research, and with actions that put students and educators at the very forefront of their decision making. More than anything, education is a human system, and we expect it to be treated as such.
WRITERS' PROFILE
ANYA U. UNGSON
Editor-in-Chief
Grade 12 HUMSS
EMIGLIANA MARIA C. SALONGA
Graphic Arts Associate Graphic Arts Editor
Grade 9
GEORGINA LOON
Copyreading Associate Editor
Grade 11 STEM
Other Organizations: Batch Committees
JODI VIEN D. MARIANO
Managing Editor and Layout Editor
Grade 12 STEM
Other Organizations: Supreme Student Council & Teatro Punlahi
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