Elpidio Quirino, teacher and educator
ELPIDIO Quirino, the 6th Philippine President, started his public service at the age of 16. Having just completed high school, Quirino applied for and was accepted as an elementary school teacher in Capriaan, a town ( no longer existing ) near Caoayan, Ilocos Sur.
The young Quirino walked daily some five kilometers, crossing a creek which separated Capriaan from Agoo.
He was to receive the sum of 12 a month which, at 1906 exchange rate, was equivalent to US$12. On his first payday, the young maestro excitedly presented himself before the Agoo municipal treasurer to collect his salary.
As required, the municipal treasurer asked the maestro for his cedula. Quirino could not produce any. He was underaged, and could not be issued a cedula yet.
The paymaster thus refused to pay Quirino. When the American Superintendent of Schools learned about this, the Superintendent waived the technicalities and authorized the treasurer to pay Quirino, saying: “If he is old enough to teach, he’s old enough to be paid for it.”
Quirino later pursued other areas of public service. He became a lawyer. He then became a representative of Ilocos Sur, a senator, a member of the Philippine Independence Commission, a delegate to the 1935 Constitutional Convention, a secretary of interior and finance under President Quezon, vice president of Manuel A. Roxas, and later president.
Quirino never forgot his roots as a teacher as well as the value of education in uplifting the common man. Long before the war began in 1941, Quirino accepted the position of Dean of the College of Law of Adamson University. He relinquished the position when he was inducted as Vice President of the Philippines.
Quirino rightly believed that: “Education is another fundamental of national progress and of production efficiency. … It is our established obsession that no child in the Philippines should be bereft of instruction.”
In the post-independence period, Quirino faced what Dr. Jaime C. Laya described as the multiple challenges of “backlog, reopening, rehabilitation” of the education system.
Quirino responded with the following initiatives: improving/standardizing the salaries of teachers, increasing the number of teachers, and increasing the number of state colleges and universities.
When informed that thousands of students could not be accommodated because of the lack of teachers, he immediately authorized, upon consultation with the Council of State, the release of sufficient funds for the employment of additional teachers.
As a result, over a four- year period from 1949 to 1952, public school teacher- to-student ratio progressively improved as follows: 1949 – 49:1; 1950 – 48:1; 1951 – 45:1; 1952 – 40:1.
Dr. Laya also gives credit to Quirino for his initiative for community participation by school teachers - a precursor of our current barangay system.
Quirino concerned himself with the need to expand access to higher learning on a nation-wide basis. He sponsored the movement for more liberal extension of higher educational facilities throughout the country so that, in his words, “the sons of the rich and the sons of the poor should have the same opportunity of obtaining university training.”
He sought approval of a bill providing for the establishment of a junior college of the University of the Philippines in Vigan. Later, an identical law provided for the operation of a junior college of the University of the Philippines in Cebu City.
The effort to make the University of the Philippines co-extensive with the archipelago which the present UP system has partially fulfilled may therefore be traced to the initiative of Quirino.
Fr. Joel Tabora, SJ, president of the Ateneo de Davao, described Quirino as a “transformative” (versus “conservative”) leader/educator.
Through his education initiatives, Quirino was able to demonstrate the following:
“His purpose was not to preserve Philippine society in the post-World War II economic malaise, its social inequality and over-dependency on America, but to produce the critical leaders and the skilled man- and woman power that would chart the democratic and industrialized future of an independent Philippines. For Quirino, education was not conservative. It was transformative.”
A fitting tribute, indeed, from one Guro to another.
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