ANY good president of the nation should be concerned with the quality of our education, from kindergarten to college, and even up to graduate school. The reason is that competition among nations and peoples has never been this intense. Every country in the world wants to get ahead, to soak up as much knowledge, skills and opportunities for economic growth as possible.
Given this situation in which countries compete with one another outside and while their citizens run the rat race inside, there is no safer and better refuge than education and skills training.
It may be said that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s expression of “disappointment” when he was informed that no Philippine university made it to the Top 100 of the 2024 Asia University Rankings of the Times Higher Education (THE) was an off-the-cuff reaction.
He was of course expecting that Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) and the University of the Philippines (UP), our leading institutions of higher learning, would be on the list.
Ateneo, the lone Philippine university to place within the Top 100 in Asia in 2023, fell to a lower bracket.
‘It should interest the ACT to know that the top universities in the world are not from the West, but from Asia such as Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore…’
While remaining as the top Philippine university, ADMU placed in the 401-500 range this year, slipping about 300 places after being ranked 84th in Asia last year.
In 2022, local universities also failed to secure a spot in the Top 100 when UP dropped to 129th place from 84th the prior year.
If you are Bongbong Marcos who sincerely wants to see hefty strides in Philippine education, disappointment and sadness are feelings that will normally surface. It’s just as well that helplessness is absent, defeated by the resolve of encouragement that perhaps, in the coming years, our universities can return to the top ranks.
First on the President’s mind is to meet with the Commission on Higher Education and the Department of Education, along with the chairmen of the education committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The private sector which handles a big part of the education system should also be included. Such a meeting could pinpoint flaws in the system, and how to bridge these gaps.
The left-leaning Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) has a contrary, if defeatist, view.
Ever the professional heckler and critic of any administration, not just the Bongbong-Sara government, ACT released its tirade, scoring the government’s supposed fixation on international education rankings, instead of focusing on what it could do to ensure that higher education institutions help industrialize the country.
The group said: “The ACT Philippines maintains that THE’s rankings do not reflect the priorities that are relevant to the Filipino masses and that its purported international standards are Western-centric yardsticks imposed on institutions based in countries structurally exploited by a Western-dominated global economy.”
This statement has shades of previous statements of both the Communist Party and the National Democratic Front, although we would not categorically say that this group belongs to these organizations. It should interest the ACT to know that the top universities in the world are not from the West, but from Asia such as Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore, and to be included in this group ranking is a huge accomplishment for Philippine universities and a source of pride for the nation’s president.
Local teachers and educators should stop the finger-pointing and alibi-hunting and buckle down to work for a better education of our youth.
