When the country shifted to the K-12 program in 2012, one of the rationales given to add two full years to basic education was that the Philippines needed to remain competitive with the rest of the world. In fact, policymakers clearly had their eye on the global labor market. The K-12 program, we were told, would put Filipino students at par with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the wind out of the sails of that hope. Today, the Philippines is among only five countries in the world—Bangladesh, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela being the other four—that have not resumed in-person classes since the contagion began in 2020.
While schools globally were closed for 79 teaching days, those in the Philippines have been closed for more than a year. Notwithstanding the mixed benefits of distance learning, that’s a full year lost—and counting.
This prolonged closure, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) says, infringes on the right to learn of more than 27 million Filipino students.
“The associated consequences of school closures—learning loss, mental distress, missed vaccinations, and heightened risk of dropout, child labor, and child marriage—will be felt by many children, especially the youngest learners in critical development stages,” Unicef Philippines representative Oyunsaikhan Dendevnorov said in a statement.
Unicef advocates a “phased reopening of schools,” beginning in areas seen as low-risk for COVID-19 infection on a voluntary basis with safety protocols in place.
In particular, Unicef said a child’s Grade 1 education sets up the building blocks for all future learning, including introductions to reading, writing, and math.
Moreover, Unicef said children’s positive experiences in primary school were a predictor of their future social, emotional and educational outcomes, and those who fall behind in learning during their early years “stay behind for the remaining time they spend in schools, and the gap widens over the years.”
Indeed, the loss of these early years would disadvantage millions of Filipino schoolchildren for years to come.
To date, in-person schooling has been stopped by one word: Fear.
President Duterte has time and again refused to approve all efforts to safely and gradually phase in in-person classes, first citing the danger of the original coronavirus, and later, the threat posed by the highly transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19.
In doing so, the President certainly reduced the risk of infection among the school population, but he has also inadvertently set back the education of 27 million Filipino students. Instead of finding ways to safely reopen schools, he imposed a blanket lockdown—an easier “solution,” but only in the short term.
Clearly, this zero-risk, zero-gain policy needs to change.
The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) noted that a wider learning gap between rich and poor students as a result of the conduct of virtual classes was more worrisome than the trillion-peso losses from school closures.
In concrete terms, 1.1 million students failed to enroll in school year 2020-2021 because of the lack of internet access and the devices needed to participate in online classes.
We need to arrest this trend before the damage becomes irreparable. School cannot be out forever.