| Continuation from Rationalizing Failures: The Philippine Government in the Education Sector All campuses and courses that do not serve the "manpower requirements for global competition," or in other words, do not serve the needs of the gigantic transnational corporations shall be deemed an "irrational drain" on precious public funds and worthy of the scrapheap. Easy targets for this kind of "rationalization" include the proposed reduction by the CHED of courses and subjects in the humanities, social sciences and the national language. Needless to say, transnational do not need employees who are well versed in Philippine history, language and culture, rather, the reverse is true. What they need are Filipinos with only a scant knowledge of themselves and a blind admiration for everything "imported." It's easy enough to see the connection between the current emphasis being given to the teaching of English and that illusory image "English competency" being touted by the government as a comparative advantage of the Filipino employee or laborer in the Southeast Asian region. More insidious still, is the attempt to instill in young pupils "values" that are doubtless meant to inculcate a respect for authority and property and an acceptance of their "place in society." This is apparently an ideological offensive on the part of the state to combat the militant unionism for which the Filipino labor is well known. Furthermore, the seemingly positive concept of "life-long education" being proposed by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Education Forum within the context of the human resources development plans of APEC, belongs hand-in-hand with the labor "contractualization" and "flexibilization" policies which serve as combined attacks upon the Filipino workers' job security and the right to form unions. All "life-long education" means is that the worker must now accept the fact that she/he must continually adapt herself/himself to the ever variable needs of transnational corporations and that the possibility of holding on to any job for any period of time is continually imperiled. Undoubtedly, funds from government are still going to tertiary education, but government will ensure that these measly funds must unconditionally and maximally serve the needs of the market for human resources. One of the most insidious effects of this kind of subjection to market forces is that the overall direction of education is taken away from the sphere of public deliberation and hidden away in the boardrooms and left to the hands of technocrats without the slightest public accountability. State universities such as UP is starting to form "curriculum committees" made up of academics and representatives from industry in order to pattern the priorities of the university after the needs of these businesses. The demands imposed by such international bodies as APEC for such things as "Universal Mobility" which means the standardization of curricula among all the member countries in order to allow the free movement of engineers, scientists, doctors and other professionals across national boundaries, not only facilitates the phenomenon of "brain drain," it also further limits the parameters allowed for a country to decide on its own what kind of knowledge are relevant to the needs of the people and the nation. What is and what is not "relevant" and therefore "rational" shall heretofore be directly acted upon and decided by the private sector with hardly any mediation from the state. This kind of supranational standardization reduces the freedom and initiative of teachers to determine the content of their teaching and condemns them to the interminable repetition of knowledge deemed necessary and profitable by the international capitalist system. Rationalization in the service of commercial interests may be placed under the broad label of "Privatization." The Privatization program of the government, which began during Pres. Cory Aquino’s term, has arrived at the final phase of privatizing social services. This presumably placed last due to the possible negative political effects such a procedure may entail especially in the education and health services which have always been chronically underserved. Privatization in these areas can only mean that those who used to have a little shall now have nothing will still have more of the same. However, it is important to realize that the term "privatization" itself is a consistent victim of double-talk. Some technocrats would find it convenient to make an extremely narrow definition of "privatization" that would be restricted to the outright sale of the government assets and properties in question. Since many SUCs have not been sold, but simply "rationalized" in the manner discussed above, they would deny that any kind of privatization is occurring in education. It is important to keep in mind a broader and more effective definition of "Privatization" which states that it is any move on the part of the government to reduce its involvement in any area or activity. "Privatization" would therefore point to a process of reducing State participation rather than to a simple, direct sale. "Rationalization" per se is not necessarily "Privatization." The State can and should "rationalize" its functioning according to a standard and measure necessary and the unnecessary arrived at through a genuinely democratic means of public deliberation. It is only when "rationalization" occurs under the unmitigated pressures of private enterprise that it is possible to speak of "privatization." While the government has always been subservient to imperialism, it can still be said that the process of "privatization" hands over the direct control of the "privatized access" to monopoly capitalism and eliminates the traditional mediatory role of the State leaving monopoly capitalists with an "unmediated" and direct control over the national system of education. The second area of concern regarding the "liberalization" of private education cited above points to the corollary process parallel and in conjunction with privatization. Government does not simply leave a vacuum in the area where it is vacated, it only withdraws in order to affect the transfer from the public to the private. To ensure this, the private sector must be encouraged to invest in education by offering all sorts of attractive incentives such as the deregulation of tuition fees and the relaxation of restrictions and requirements. CHED has claimed that it has a purely regulatory role in relation to tuition fee increases and cannot prevent schools and universities from regularly implementing the increases. However, even while it still requires that 70 percent of any tuition fee increase should be used for teacher compensation, 20 percent for overhead costs and 10 percent for return on investment, CHED does not even have enough resources to make sure whether all educational institutions which have recently increased their tuition have really allotted 70 percent for the salary increases of teachers. As it is, the economic condition of the teachers in private schools at the primary and tertiary level are, in general, appreciably lower than that of the teachers in public schools. The privatization, rationalization, commercialization and liberalization of SUCs in the name of improving basic education does not mean that basic education itself is spared from these relentless processes. The fact is that even withdrawal of government from tertiary education does not translate into enough resources for the provision of basic education. A controversial case of privatization in basic education is the phasing out of the Instructional Development Center under DECS and the privatization of the publication of public schools textbooks by this year under the Book Publishing Industry Development Act. Of course, the main objection to this is the inevitable increase in the prices of learning materials and the problem of insufficient supply. However, apparently more significant is the policy of devolution being implemented in the primary and secondary levels is really only another form of rationalization. "Devolution" means that part of the burden of financing education shall be shifted to the Local Government Units (LGUs) and the private sector. Concomitant to this, devolution cannot be implemented without that parallel phenomenon of "decentralization." It is claimed that "centralized academic and financial management and supervision does not encourage innovation and initiative at the school level." Decentralization thus takes the form of assigning "more prerogatives and resources for school heads" and the improvement of their entrepreneurial and managerial skills. It is hoped that decentralization shall result in greater efficiency, responsiveness and competition. Public educational institutions shall therefore be forced to vie with one another for "scarce" educational funding. Since 1991, the Local Government Code (LGC) has institutionalized two elements, which serve as preliminary steps towards devolving the public educational sector. The first of these are the School Boards covering provinces, cities or municipalities which are headed by LGU and DECS officials and tasked with allocating local government funds to education. The second is the Special Education Fund (SEF) which is set aside by the LGUs for the maintenance and construction of educational facilities and for the granting of additional benefits to teaching and non-teaching personnel. The current review of the LGC is also geared towards devolving more educational functions excluding teachers' salaries. The government admits that "devolution" may worsen already increasing inequities in education since LGUs can only give that amount of funding which they can afford. The gap between poorer and wealthier LGUs will replicate itself within the educational institutions themselves and thereby make the chasm separating poor and affluent schools even wider. The solution, which DECS proposes, is to increase the share of wealthy LGUs in shouldering education while increasing the relative amount that the poorer LGUs shall receive. In other words, they aim to determine the amount of local subsidies necessary on a case-to-case basis. Which means that there shall be an overall shift in education expenditure from the central to the local governments. It is through this devolutionary rationalization of resources that government aims to be able to "target the most needy." This kind of maneuver may by now be quite familiar. By a sleight of hand, government succeeds in pitting the recipients of educational funding against each other and at the same time gains the moral high ground by appealing to "poverty alleviation." By labeling the increased dependence of the educational institutions upon local community involvement and financing as decentralization and "grassroots empowerment" it fosters the illusion that where there is minimal state power is where the people's power lies, thereby obscuring the obvious fact that the power of the people should reside in the state or there should be no state at all. What is hidden behind all of the above-mentioned apologetics is the fact, that government does not hesitate at all to sacrifice the interests of the vast majority of Filipino people to the interests of the IMF-WB. It distributes a pittance among the poor while "redistributing" the nation's real wealth among the ruling elites and the gigantic and greedy transnational corporations. The Ramos government thinks that it can fool the people into believing that the bitter medicine of privatization and rationalization under the aegis of liberalization is all for the good of the nation. It thinks that it can make people believe that the education budget has reached the highest possible ceiling and cannot be augmented anymore even if it shovels billions into the pockets of foreign banks. It will continue to dismantle even the barest structures of social services in the Philippines heedless of the fact that this will inevitably result in even more intense pauperization and exploitation for the great majority. However, the "inconvenient" reality for those in power is that even the most abstruse calculations for maximization and efficiency cannot factor out the political movements that continually gain in strength as more and more people find no other alternative but to protest against these blatant attacks on both their political and economic rights. -------------------------------------- This article originally appeared on the Education for Development Magazine of Ibon Databank, Philippines, December 1997. |
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