SENATOR Richard J. Gordon said the Philippines should strive to become Asia’s intellectual superpower and underscored the need for a substantial increase in the salary of the country’s public school teachers to attract and retain the best educators.
During the Senate deliberation on the budget of the Department of Education, Gordon cited studies which show that neither class size nor school curricula produce bright and good students but good teachers do.
“Our country has the right population age to greatly contribute to the development of our country,” said Gordon. “But we’re going to miss the bus if we’re not going to improve the quality of education of our young population.”
To be able to educate our young population to enable them to compete with the best in the world, he cited the need to provide schools with good, well-trained and properly motivated teachers, especially in the public school sector.
“Never mind the class size and the school curricula, it is good teachers that we need. Our children would be smarter and more competitive if they have good teachers,” he said.
“How can we entice the best instructors to teach in our public schools when the salary of our public school teachers lag behind teachers in our neighboring countries in Asia? We have to give them better salaries,” he added.
“We have to leave our mark in the sense that we made the country better. We have to make our people become better educated so that we can be the intellectual superpower of Asia,” he also said.
Meanwhile, he asked the Bureau of Corrections to allocate a budget to allow prisoners to work in prison and be used productively.
He said such productive use of prison labor would be part of the inmates’ reformation before being reintegrated into society.
During the deliberation on the budget of the Department of Justice, he said prisoners, whose jail terms have almost been completely served, could be made to work on projects such as flood control.
“They could plant trees on denuded mountains so that floods could be prevented. They could also desilt rivers or they could fix damaged irrigation canals or systems to improve crop production in the country. They could be given allowances for the community work,” the senator said.