Digital void exposes our broken educational system

TRY to paint a mental picture of a remote public elementary school so lacking in facilities that it has to hold classes under shades of trees. Or, in small spaces like former bathrooms and former closets that had been converted into mini-classrooms. They are very real; not fictional classrooms. Worse, of the 64,000-classroom lack that was supposed to be filled this year, a budget for only 10,000 new classrooms was in the 2020 national budget.

Education is the constitutional priority of state investments but there is a built-in problem — 85 percent of the budget is for salaries, wages and other mandatory expenses, and only 15 percent is for capex.

As the virus disrupted face-to-face classes and education has been forced to move online, what do you think is the digital state of such remote classrooms in these God-forsaken places? What are the chances

of providing online education to public schools that can’t even provide enough classrooms? These questions are relevant because online education is the only way out of the virus. Almost zero is the answer.

The digitally left- out areas, however, have a name, the socalled GIDAs — the geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas. Again, try to have a mental picture of how the public schools in these areas ( the private schools do not usually reach such places) that lack decent classrooms, and where teachers and students have to walk miles or take long boat rides just to reach their schools, would fare in a digitally- driven educational system.

Don’t even try to imagine how these school districts would be able to cope because there is absolutely no way for them to do it.

So, what then happens to the public educational system under severe strain to provide the tools for online education? To say “uncertain” would be the kindest description of an educational system with those great handicaps under a Covid- 19 regime. These GIDA schools, come the opening of the school year, will be caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they hold face- to- face classes and take the huge risks or scrap the school year altogether. There is this promise to provide, in lieu of the web, transistor radios. The sad optic of transistor radios making a comeback in the 21st century to make possible the most important mandate of the State would be very depressing.

We can’t go back to transistor radios. These radios broadcast cultural fare of earlier times —

and — but they don’t have the staying power ( battery life) to sustain five to six hours of continuous classroom instructions. Besides, it would be a bad optic for a country that wants to spend at least P8 trillion under the Build, Build, Build program. Just buying the batteries for the transistor radios would be costlier, in the long run, than cabling for internet connections.

Roads and ports and bridges cannot have priority over the constitutional mandate of educating the young. The money we have right now has to be dedicated to health, then education.

How depressing is the state of connectivity of the public educational system? My inbox has a copy of a press statement from the office of Sen. Ralph Recto a few days back and this was what the press release said: The free Wi- Fi program of the Department of Education has been rolled out in only 687 out of the 47,025 DepEd- run schools and in only 233 of the staterun colleges and local government unit- run colleges.

But then again, the premier tertiary school in the country, the University of the Philippines, does not even have the confidence of holding online classes for students of its flagship Diliman campus in Quezon City because many students are not in a financial position to buy and maintain basic laptops. For online education to work, there should be adequate connectivity and the students have to have laptops. There is this hype that claims that only two of the state colleges and universities are not connected. I think this is a brazen lie.

The other problem, the Recto press release said, was this: Even if public school students would have the desired “universal laptop ownership” — which may perhaps happen in a hundred years — the bigger worry would be internet speed.

The press release said the Philippines “ranks 110th in fixed broadband speed and 121st in mobile internet speed out of 139 countries surveyed. Put simply, ( It is a mystery that the Philippines, the texting capital of the world is a laggard in internet speed. It just says we are so consumed with texting that we have brushed aside technical inadequacies.)

On digital education, we have been failing in all fronts. The connectively is sputtering and the laptops needed are beyond the means of children of school age.

So, what is the way forward? It is all grim and bleak. There is only one option left, which is to postpone the opening of the school year. Wait for better times. It may be October or November or December. Or, in the early months of 2021.

What is more depressing in the realm of the policy sphere is that educational issues have been relegated to secondary or tertiary priorities. No one takes educational issues seriously and the one and only idea put forward to go around the lack of web connectivity was the use of transistor radios.

The problem of other countries is digital divide. Ours void so huge that it is impossible to plug. is a