Do you remember the story of the Scholars and the Lion? The story involved four scholars but only one had common sense. The others decided to revive a dead lion back to life even if it posed much danger. Sadly, the same thing can be said about the education system of the Philippines today -- it's been too much focus on books and too little on common sense. While dropping out of school to live a bum life doesn't mean you have wisdom yet some of the most stupid people today are in fact very highly educated people (with plenty of academic awards) and some even have high intellectual quotients. It's just like how the three highly intelligent scholars were very stupid to revive the dead lion while the other decided to object to such foolishness.
The objective of education is to prepare people for the real world. Unfortunately, that's not much of the case in today's schooling education system. So what's wrong with schooling these days? There's too much focus on the grades, values education has become too theoretical, maybe some copy the American education system too much (without considering other Asian neighbors have better models for success) and not to mention giving too much homework.
Homework is good but too much of a good thing can be bad, right? The problems that I really had with school was too many assignments and then you have an exam. I remembered the statement of burning the midnight candle side to side but is it really a good thing? It's really contributing to what you'd call the sleep deprived population. One can be commended for staying up to 11 P.M. or 12 P.M. studying all of one's lessons but can an person really recover one's sanity after getting high test grades? Exams are there to show how much you've learned. The problem is even if someone gets really high grades -- most of them just end up becoming very stupid when it comes to real life!
How can you expect the Filipino youth to get enough sleep if they get too much to do? Sure, giving them homework or assignments can help mold the mind but too much is too much. While staying up late to play video games or watch TV is bad for students (especially when there's school the next day) but again so is staying up late because the schools are giving too much homework. This could start that teachers should avoid giving homework during the weekends and exams on Mondays so students can have time for themselves or to give extra study days. For example, having an exam or homework due on Tuesday instead of Monday can allow a person to actually use the weekends as extra space for working while getting some badly needed sleep.
Now take a look at how "everybody's favorite tyranny" namely Singapore with how they do their education system. So why are they capable of doing that? Singapore has all the money because they are driven by a free market economy but that's not where it stops. They have decided to invest that money in improving education systems. I guess the problem of the Philippine education system is the overworked and underpaid teacher -- that may explain why many of them end up either as lazy or even throw their frustrations at their students because they are unmotivated aside from an environment where discipline is hardly enforced. Singapore has both discipline and highly motivated teachers to help make the system work. Now watch the video before reading the rest of this post first.
If you're done then notice how they try to connect everything to real life situations. Perhaps one reason why I developed an on and off math anxiety (and many do) is that people ask or say it many times, "We won't use this in real life! I don't see how doing sine and cosine will be relevant to me!" I once questioned the validity of using the Cartesian plane in real life until I realized that it can be used to show the relationship of two variables or to determine profits and losses. I used to loath calculus at first until I realized that while I may not be using engineering calculus but I could use calculus to determine the best optimal yields and profits. There's plenty of difficult subjects but all these subjects that not everyone may be using later can help you appreciate its application by other professions. I just loathed almost every higher math related subject until I realized some truths like how trigonometry is used along with geometry to build well-designed infrastructures. I may suck at physics and chemistry (computation-wise) but at least I can appreciate everything around me better or the technology that I benefit from or to be critical towards taking modernization at a wrong direction.
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Don't give me that, "But we must first wait until Filipinos get better before we change the system!" That's stupid for this reason -- you don't wait for people to stop smoking in public places before you put a no smoking ban for public places. Instead, you put a no smoking ban for public places so people will have a reason not to smoke in public places. It's never "tao muna bago sistema" (people first before system) but rather "system first before people". You can always get a competent head for the Department of Education but if the system doesn't encourage competency then expect a huge opportunity loss in producing better Filipino students.
Not to mention, eight out of ten of the most educated countries in the world according to CNBC are parliamentary countries. The U.S. is presidential and South Korea is semi-presidential and semi-parliamentary. However, we see that the countries in the list namely Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, Australia, United Kingdom, Israel, Japan and Canada are in fact parliamentary countries. This is also why I advocate in shifting to a parliamentary system where competency beats popularity.
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