Nurture Tomorrow WITH A PROGRESSIVE SCIENCE EDUCATION
FOUR POINT THREE TRILLION PESOS. The education sector is set to get the lion’s share, with P654.77 billion allotted to the Department of Education (DepEd), State Universities and Colleges (SUCs), and the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) combined. At first glance, Philippine education looks well-cared for. So by extension, science education must be thriving as well. However, Duterte’s track record in education has been dismal so far. With an ingenuine promise for free education, campus militarization, and countless human rights violations as more than a hundred of Lumad schools were forcibly closed down – all in the past three years. We should be well past the point of expecting anything new.
opinion
Ingenuine promises As one of the university’s largest colleges in terms of student population, it can be said that the College of Science is one of the most heavily affected by inadequate educational policies. At present, there is already a multitude of pressing concerns: incomplete reagents, defunct instruments, the dorm slot crisis, and delayed stipends, to name a few. In fact, in the Academic Year 2018-2019, beneficiaries of the Department of Science and TechnologyScience Education Institute (DOST-SEI) Undergraduate Scholarship Program suffered months of delayed release of stipends. To nurture the best of the best, we need to provide to them the best education possible— from opportunities, facilities, and quality instruction. But this cannot be accomplished
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with the way things are looking now, not when students still suffer from insufficient research subsidies and outdated laboratory apparatus. The point is that the fight does not stop with the passing of Republic Act 10931 (R.A. 10931) otherwise known as the Free Tuition Act. We need genuinely free and quality education starting with higher state education subsidies. The discussion on free education has been a long-standing issue. While the struggle for a truly free educational system has achieved significant progress with the passing of R.A. 10931, it is much too early to bask in content and triumph. There are still many challenges that hinder the pursuit of free education; in fact, many students are forced to pay a multitude of fees, such as graduation fees and other auxiliary requirements that they should be able to do without. In particular, CHED released a list of allowed Other School Fees (OSFs) essentially imposing compulsory payment from students. This, however, directly contradicts R.A. 10931 which very clearly states that education must be free of charge. Perhaps for some of us, it may seem that everything is easy or relatively easier. But it is of no doubt that there are those among us who struggle to get by day by day, forced to complete jobs while pushing through the semester just to meet their necessities. Let this remind us to never settle in the apathy of privilege and recognize that the fight for our rights needs all the support it can get. Every single peso that the R.A. 10931 has failed to provide contributes to the plight of the disenfranchised.’
scientia vol 26 no 2
