MARIA CHRISTINA GUERRERO
SPOKESPERSON
KM-SOUTHEAST NEGROS
KABATAANG MAKABAYAN
NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC FRONT OF THE PHILIPPINES
AUGUST 15, 2020
One of the direst consequences of the Duterte administration’s ineptitude at addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, and the accompanying public health and economic crisis, is the sharp debilitation of the public education system. Resting as it already did on feeble foundations, the state education apparatus finds itself in a precarious predicament. On the president’s orders, traditional face-to-face learning is forbidden, until a vaccine is available. For the meantime, the Department of Education has to make do with its limited resources in delivering good-quality mass public education to the millions of student children and youth whose schooling have been put on hold. This is where “blended learning” comes in: online, modular, TV and radio based broadcast education.
As a relatively recent 21st century innovation, online education is a highly effective method of instruction, already placed into practice in most countries as a teaching alternative, and yielding impressive results long before the emergence of the novel coronavirus; online universities have gradually popped up across the globe. One need only to refer to the multitude of graduate students who earned their degrees thru online courses; and who could gloss over the countless peoples all over the world who mastered foreign languages on account of online classes. With the complete set of equipment – laptop computers, high-speed internet connection, smartphones, tablets, and of course, the economic stability and financial capability to acquire these in the first place – online based schooling should at least be up to par with the conventional classroom setup. In short, online education is feasible with the appropriate means, which are not available to the majority of Filipinos.
Modular, along with TV and radio based broadcast, however, have never been seriously considered to be a primary means of instruction; rather, they are supplements, and not alternatives. University lectures uploaded on YouTube, Math problem solving tutorials, and the classic college entrance exams reviewers are trademark examples of this. Clearly, this kind of supplementary material is not meant to substitute the customary social dynamic among living-breathing human educators and their students. Case in point, watching a series of personality psychology lectures on YouTube can never be similar to attending a formal course on the subject; reading an encyclopedia of physics is clearly not the same as actually attending physics classes at university and going thru the rigorous subject curriculum; acing the trigonometry problem set on the maths section of the college exam reviewer is so unlike taking the final exam after a semester of lectures, quizzes, and homework; Japanese and Koreans would obviously prefer to having a lovely Filipina lady teaching them conversational English via Skype, while studying books on how to speak the English language as supplement.
Now, for the prestigious schools, especially the top-dog universities, online learning should be no problem for students and educators, with all having access to the necessary prerequisites. However, the children, teenagers, and young adults of poor peasant and worker families do not have that kind of luxury. The reality is that the majority of the student population, locked into their homesteads, resides in the countryside, where internet connection, computers, and electricity, not to mention paved roads and running water are more or less uncommon; so modular, TV and radio broadcast based learning are the remaining options, which are supplements, and never have been, alternatives to learning. In substitute for the teachers would most conveniently be the householders, the parents or guardians, who more often than not have likewise been deprived of their right to education. What this must necessarily imply is that the inaccessibility to good-quality education has been consequently made many times worse, also further widening the gap between state and private schools and among their faculty, staff, and students; again making more stark the blatant rich-poor divide that conspicuously demarcates the national social landscape.
Another prime ramification to ponder on is blended learning’s effect on child development and parent roles, and teacher workload. Human beings are social creatures that thrive in a world with others; in this connection, the capacity, the skill to harmoniously engage in dynamic social interaction with fellow humans, the adeptness at playing social games, and the proficiency in maneuvering within social hierarchies are developed at the crucial stage of childhood. A point in line with this, children must constantly have adult supervision especially in their education and development. Necessarily, parents must double the role of teachers, while teachers now overwhelmed with the duty to supervise child students without actual interaction with them; this, of course, defeats the purpose of schools, as one of the main joys of parents is sending children to an institution that takes care of and educates their children, relieving them of the stresses of parenting for a few hours a day. Depriving the Filipino children of crucial face-to-face human interaction much needed in order to develop a fully socially functioning human being is something the present Duterte administration must be held accountable for, and will be etched in history as one of the GRP’s major screw-ups.
As clear as the light of day, despite the present administration’s grand educational schemes conjured up by their detached-from-reality technocrats, the state is not prepared to implement so called blended learning on a mass scale. Budgetary constraints – accordingly, negatively affecting human resources, facilities, materials, actual salaries of teachers, and overall quality of education — are clear obstacles that cannot be negotiated with, bringing to the surface and making more glaring the underfunded condition of the Department of Education, which has been forced to once again move the reopening of public schools this coming October. With the novel coronavirus helping to expose the whole puppet GRP machinery as a neoliberal catastrophe plagued by perpetual and ever-worsening politico-economic crises, the Filipino people more militantly demand a first-class, scientific, national, mass oriented education that serves the interests of the nation and its citizens, especially the great masses of workers and peasants. A nationwide social uprising is brewing, and the educators and youth are consequently, along with all patriotic, freedom-loving Filipinos, pushed to venture onto the radical path of national democratic revolution.##
https://cpp.ph/statement/some-comments-on-so-called-blended-learning-aptly-a-blended-neoliberal-catastrophe/
One of the direst consequences of the Duterte administration’s ineptitude at addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, and the accompanying public health and economic crisis, is the sharp debilitation of the public education system. Resting as it already did on feeble foundations, the state education apparatus finds itself in a precarious predicament. On the president’s orders, traditional face-to-face learning is forbidden, until a vaccine is available. For the meantime, the Department of Education has to make do with its limited resources in delivering good-quality mass public education to the millions of student children and youth whose schooling have been put on hold. This is where “blended learning” comes in: online, modular, TV and radio based broadcast education.
As a relatively recent 21st century innovation, online education is a highly effective method of instruction, already placed into practice in most countries as a teaching alternative, and yielding impressive results long before the emergence of the novel coronavirus; online universities have gradually popped up across the globe. One need only to refer to the multitude of graduate students who earned their degrees thru online courses; and who could gloss over the countless peoples all over the world who mastered foreign languages on account of online classes. With the complete set of equipment – laptop computers, high-speed internet connection, smartphones, tablets, and of course, the economic stability and financial capability to acquire these in the first place – online based schooling should at least be up to par with the conventional classroom setup. In short, online education is feasible with the appropriate means, which are not available to the majority of Filipinos.
Modular, along with TV and radio based broadcast, however, have never been seriously considered to be a primary means of instruction; rather, they are supplements, and not alternatives. University lectures uploaded on YouTube, Math problem solving tutorials, and the classic college entrance exams reviewers are trademark examples of this. Clearly, this kind of supplementary material is not meant to substitute the customary social dynamic among living-breathing human educators and their students. Case in point, watching a series of personality psychology lectures on YouTube can never be similar to attending a formal course on the subject; reading an encyclopedia of physics is clearly not the same as actually attending physics classes at university and going thru the rigorous subject curriculum; acing the trigonometry problem set on the maths section of the college exam reviewer is so unlike taking the final exam after a semester of lectures, quizzes, and homework; Japanese and Koreans would obviously prefer to having a lovely Filipina lady teaching them conversational English via Skype, while studying books on how to speak the English language as supplement.
Now, for the prestigious schools, especially the top-dog universities, online learning should be no problem for students and educators, with all having access to the necessary prerequisites. However, the children, teenagers, and young adults of poor peasant and worker families do not have that kind of luxury. The reality is that the majority of the student population, locked into their homesteads, resides in the countryside, where internet connection, computers, and electricity, not to mention paved roads and running water are more or less uncommon; so modular, TV and radio broadcast based learning are the remaining options, which are supplements, and never have been, alternatives to learning. In substitute for the teachers would most conveniently be the householders, the parents or guardians, who more often than not have likewise been deprived of their right to education. What this must necessarily imply is that the inaccessibility to good-quality education has been consequently made many times worse, also further widening the gap between state and private schools and among their faculty, staff, and students; again making more stark the blatant rich-poor divide that conspicuously demarcates the national social landscape.
Another prime ramification to ponder on is blended learning’s effect on child development and parent roles, and teacher workload. Human beings are social creatures that thrive in a world with others; in this connection, the capacity, the skill to harmoniously engage in dynamic social interaction with fellow humans, the adeptness at playing social games, and the proficiency in maneuvering within social hierarchies are developed at the crucial stage of childhood. A point in line with this, children must constantly have adult supervision especially in their education and development. Necessarily, parents must double the role of teachers, while teachers now overwhelmed with the duty to supervise child students without actual interaction with them; this, of course, defeats the purpose of schools, as one of the main joys of parents is sending children to an institution that takes care of and educates their children, relieving them of the stresses of parenting for a few hours a day. Depriving the Filipino children of crucial face-to-face human interaction much needed in order to develop a fully socially functioning human being is something the present Duterte administration must be held accountable for, and will be etched in history as one of the GRP’s major screw-ups.
As clear as the light of day, despite the present administration’s grand educational schemes conjured up by their detached-from-reality technocrats, the state is not prepared to implement so called blended learning on a mass scale. Budgetary constraints – accordingly, negatively affecting human resources, facilities, materials, actual salaries of teachers, and overall quality of education — are clear obstacles that cannot be negotiated with, bringing to the surface and making more glaring the underfunded condition of the Department of Education, which has been forced to once again move the reopening of public schools this coming October. With the novel coronavirus helping to expose the whole puppet GRP machinery as a neoliberal catastrophe plagued by perpetual and ever-worsening politico-economic crises, the Filipino people more militantly demand a first-class, scientific, national, mass oriented education that serves the interests of the nation and its citizens, especially the great masses of workers and peasants. A nationwide social uprising is brewing, and the educators and youth are consequently, along with all patriotic, freedom-loving Filipinos, pushed to venture onto the radical path of national democratic revolution.##
https://cpp.ph/statement/some-comments-on-so-called-blended-learning-aptly-a-blended-neoliberal-catastrophe/
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