Education, key to poverty alleviation

Yes, if you allow me to be bold - I say that EDUCATION is the key to solving the world's poverty problem. Unfortunately, most governments, the Philippines included, do not see it this way and would rather be reactive to the problems that currently plague the country AND invest on other things instead of education.



In the Philippines, education takes a very little slice of the annual national budget. The bulk, if I am not mistaken, goes to the military - in combatting the "insurgents". Whilst I am not saying that it is not important to quell the decades long insurgency problem, education should not, however, take a back seat.

The problems of education in the Philippines include low teacher salaries, lack of classrooms, lack of textbooks and lack of computers. To combat this, I think we should first invest on the quality of education that our current students get from the current crop of teachers. Due to the low salaries, the best teachers leave the country for the likes of the United States, which pay a significantly higher salary than what they're getting locally. Those who are stuck in the country often belong to the mediocre crop of teachers.

If the government increases the salary of the teachers, or make it tax exempt, if there is no budget (which I doubt), it will make the profession attractive. This will attract more students to go into this vocation and eventually produce more teachers than what is demanded. With more supply, schools will be able to select the best teachers who applies and eventually the quality of education increases.

The lack of classrooms can easily be solved if and when the quality of education improves. I believe that there are corporations out there that can contribute to the construction of classrooms. At this point, I think some of them see it as a pointless investment since the quality of education is rapidly deteriorating rather than improving.

Textbooks and computers can be donated as well. I do not think that the lack of textbooks is a problem specially if we have schools wired to the internet. This is a rather larger investment, of course, but very well worth it, imho. In this day and age, I think that students cannot afford not to know how to use a computer or search data on the internet. The problem is, the current crop of teachers do not even know how to use computers!

One thing that I see why the Philippine government is NOT investing that much in education is this -- the more illiterate the majority, the easier to manipulate them and the easier to get their votes come election time. An educated majority will make it more difficult for politicians to convince them and get their votes!

[Image from Flickr:tajai]