What is backward and uncompetitive? Our institutions

INSTEAD of unceasing assaults on the Constitution, the two chambers of Congress should instead pass with urgency something along the lines of an Open-Ended Education Funding Act. This means allocating 10 percent of the yearly GDP to education until such time that our 10- and 15-year-olds (the cohorts in the Timss and PISA evaluations, respectively) can read and understand age-appropriate text and solve math problems and science lessons with relative ease. Until our learning poverty rate matches that of Singapore, instead of the globally embarrassing 91 percent. Until, the foundation for a world-class education shall have been built from the bottom up.

That same investment would guarantee the sustained production of breakthrough and cutting-edge research work at our public research universities, world-class research outputs that would, once developed into real-world products and applications, immensely benefit the public and the private sectors.

That same investment would unlock the potential of the Filipino, an innately talented race forced to wallow in mediocrity because of our failed and backward educational system. There are thousands of potential Steve Wozniaks in the far-flung public schools. Only, there is no institutional support and unlocking mechanism to make their innate talents prosper and bloom. We don’t need bare classroom walls and ROTC and historical revisionism. Just the bare-bones foundation of a globally competitive education.

At some point, after the sustained policy of money infusion into the education sector has achieved its gains, even the face of our OFW diaspora will change. We will be exporting Satya Nadellas and Sundar Pichais and Ajay Bangas to the world instead of domestic helpers and fruit pickers.

On the relentless and asinine assaults on our Constitution, no one has pointed out this fact — Chile has had two failed constitutional votes. Chileans, we all know, voted unanimously to write a new constitution. And the current Pinochetera Constitution that Chileans want to expunge is precisely the free market, open-up-everything Constitution that the proponents of Charter change here want to put in place. The despised Constitution of the Chileans that dates back to the 1980s is now the dreamed-of constitution of the Philippines in the 21st century — a reflection of the antediluvian mindsets of our current political overlords.

There is nothing backward with our current Constitution. There is nothing in our fundamental law that drags down economic growth. It just happened that bunches of political scalawags have been trying to rewrite one of the best Constitutions in the world after the exit of Mrs. Aquino from power to either extend their stay in power or make the Constitution a scapegoat for their official failings.

The certifiable backward components, starting with our mediocre educational system, are easy to identify because they stand out like drunks in a churchyard.

The hoe, a primitive farming tool, remains the most ubiquitous farming tool among Filipino farmers in the 21st century for a reason. The Philippines is the Asean laggard in farm mechanization, and the state agencies charged with fabricating and assembling modern farm equipment have been more focused on issuing press releases touting their supposed accomplishments than doing the actual assembly and distribution of tractors, combines, seeders and other important farm implements. The vestiges of 19th-century agricultural practices have never gone away, found not only in the stillwidespread use of hoes but even in the usurious lending practices that small farmers have to avail of when desperate for production loans. When a farmer is out of mainstream credit — which most small Filipino farmers are — your refuge is the usurers.

The sacada way of harvesting sugar during the milling season remains the practice in many farming areas of the country. The old sugar mills of the 20th century may have disappeared — now part of the REIT portfolio of the Manila-based real estate giants — but the manual, backbreaking work of cutting sugar and loading the cane onto trucks is still a way of life in many sugarproducing areas. But tougher than the sacada way of harvesting sugar is pulling the cassava tubers manually and packing these into sacks, around 70 kilograms for each sack, then manually hefting over these heavy sacks into the flatbeds of waiting trucks. All this is done under the scorching heat and in areas where the next source of drinking water is 1 or 2 kilometers away. I did this in my prime farming years, but doing it now would surely land me in the ICU.

These are not farming anecdotes. They are representative of the overall backward state of the agriculture sector. It is the reason that the growth in the country’s agriculture sector — if you could technically call this “growth” — is driven by the massive output of tocino producers and fruit plantations exporting to developed economies. It is the reason we import rice, corn and sugar, the most vital crops, on top of the usual meat, chicken and fish imports.

And it is our backward agri sector that makes the African swine fever (ASF) a potent hog killer, long after the 11 countries originally hit by the swine epidemic have fully recovered from the infestation.

It is the reason the small farmers are locked up in a life of forever misery, and the rural areas have been the public face of intractable and massive poverty.

OK, what about the metropolitan institutions?

As the business papers carried stories on the supposed coming rise of Metro Manila into one of the most vibrant metropolises in the world, a global population entity revealed some harsh truths. We are one of the Top 10 countries in the world in terms of homeless people, most of them in the squatter settlements of Metro Manila.

And trackers of urban traffic said Metro Manila is the metropolitan area with the world’s worst traffic jams, an urban hellscape where, tragically, cars are favored over mass carriers and traffic policies are based not on transport science but on whimsy.

Metro Manila is a showcase of economic inequality’s brutal wages. McMansions are the norm in the gated villages for the top 1 percent. Not very far away are squatter settlements of dehumanizing poverty.

It would not be farfetched to say that soon, the Constitution will be blamed for our traffic nightmares, the ravages of inequality and massive poverty.