Increased support for education, not another messing up with our school calendar.
That was the reaction of many educators and even students themselves when Education Secretary Sonny Angara unveiled yet another potential strategy to arrest the alarming decline of reading and critical thinking skills among Filipino students.
That strategy: split the academic year into a “trimester,” which Angara claims will give ample time for extra-curricular and curricular activities.
Critics, however, see the new schedule as yet another attempt to “fix” the issue of failing literacy without actually going to the root cause.
What is the root cause of our Filipino students’ failing dismally in reading, writing and critical thinking skills?
It’s the government’s lack of interest in investing in our education sector, period.
Even with the Marcos administration boasting that the 2026 budget for our education sector – a whopping P1.015 trillion – was the “highest” in history, it actually falls short of the international standard of 6 percent of a country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
And with the pervasive, reckless and unfettered corruption that has become a way of life under this administration, we can never be sure if those funds are actually spent in increasing the number of schoolbuildings or purchasing the appropriate schoolbooks or ensuring the security of our teachers, who continually (and heroically) pump leaking water out of a sinking ship, so to speak.
Let’s put it bluntly: our education sector is now a sinking ship. Not just because our leaders have failed to provide it with the necessary support, but also because their behavior has set a bad example to our youth: that in this country, corruption is a “necessary evil.”
But what is more disheartening is that we refuse to listen to those who pump the waters of corruption, ignorance and evil out of this ship, those who genuinely care for their “second children” and those who still believe that our country is still worth saving for.
Who would really believe that a calendar change will correct a pervasive culture of ignorance that feeds corruption?
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