“We opened classes last year. We successfully ended them. Now we are opening another school year. Isn’t that success worthy of celebration?” Education Secretary Leonor Briones cries victorious over the COVID-19 pandemic despite the obvious ire and sore news plaguing DepEd and its severely lacking response to the pandemic-driven school closures.
Continuity does not equate to success. On the 13th of September 2021, Briones proclaimed with great joy continuing education despite the harrowing pains and hurdles the pandemic brought to the education sector. Students: deprived; teachers: overworked; funds: inadequate; learning materials: erroneous. Despite all these actualities staring the department in the face, continuity was romanticized, and blind resiliency was perpetuated, while they stayed ill-prepared to face the shift.
“Learning must continue,” and continue it must. The whole world, crippled by the pandemic, adapted to the situation and transitioned into remote learning – combining both online and modular settings. The Philippines, unlike most countries, did not have the internet capacity to fully adapt to synchronous sessions, nor did students and teachers have the economic capability to provide their own gadgets considering the poverty rate of 2021 resulting to 18.1% equating to 20 million of the population, in comparison to 2018’s 16.7% poverty rate according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). On this issue, some were lucky enough to receive assistance: a number of teachers were provided with laptops, the department gave a regular monthly load for internet use, and other local government units distributed tablets to students in public schools. But not all were lucky enough to receive said assistance, most were left grasping at straws to make ends meet.
And this is where modular learning comes in, to fill in the hole for inclusivity, students are provided with printed modules to serve as learning materials for the student, heavily relying on the student’s capacity for independent learning. It accommodated those who could not afford the online setting but it was not without faults.
Questionable content. Concerned parents, siblings, and the students themselves shed light on controversial statements found in the modules: A sex-crazed creature as the definition for the widely-known Filipino folklore we know as aswang. Farmers are stereotyped as poor; issues of body-shaming Angel Locsin; discrimination of Igorot due to differences in clothing; and cases of gender bias and discrimination perpetuating outdated mindsets of women only belonging to the home. These are just a number of issues that caught the population’s attention, not forgetting the obvious lack of proofreading, shown by the mass typographical and grammatical errors found in the materials.
Education Undersecretary Diosdado San Antonio addressed another challenge which was the rotation basis of modules to accommodate all students due to the funding being far too lacking to provide modules on a 1:1 basis. Only P15 billion of the P35 billion proposal was allotted by the Department of Budget and Management in the 2021 National Budget for module production. This resulted in teachers going out of their way to solicit help to fill in the gap lack of funding created.
On June 2022, the World Bank released a report on the quality of education, the results? Learning poverty and learning deprivation. The Philippines claimed one of the highest rates of learning poverty with 90.9 percent in children aged 10 and 90.4 percent deprived of learning.
Reopening of schools in the country took 2 years to come into reality, the Philippines being one of the last ones to open its gates to learning. DepEd’s claim of success is at odds with experiences teachers and students faced. Ordeals, sugarcoated with resilience and resourcefulness to cover up the glaring discrepancies and inadequate response from the department. Schools were left to fend for themselves and beg for monetary support to provide printed materials, the pillars for modular learning. Students who were kept locked up in their homes now suffer deprivation and poverty in learning.
Is education a success? If the Department of Education declared it as such, then it probably is – for the blind and unfeeling.
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