#ThrowbackThursdays: Underperforming Filipino Students Threatened with Bad Job Opportunities

 

It's Thursday, and I will try to recall some things from a business and economics perspective. I thought about how I didn't do well as a high school student, and that teachers often tell me to look past by it. Even the late headmistress (who died of cancer in 2019) told me that when my high school report card was submitted ot the University of San Carlos, it should be a letting-go ritual. 

I still couldn't get over the toxic attitude that people have towards menial labor. Back then, I remember how I started slipping in my studies. Eventually, I started getting bad grades. The Filipino subject even had an example of a father trying to get his child to study, showing him the work of menial workers as the "fate of those who don't study hard enough". The child was scared to see people do carpentry work. I was told that if I weren't studying hard enough, I would end up as a garbage collector. However, Typhoon Odette proved that society needed garbage collectors, janitors, and other forms of menial work to clear up the debris and repair their houses. 

This cartoon above shows the problem with the education system. I ask whether the Philippine education system is educating or just automating students. We teach everything according to a one-size-fits-all system. My favorite example of automating students is mathematics, and the reality is that the real reason why I hated mathematics was the way it was taught. Mathematics is taught in such an abstract way that teachers grade students on how fast and how accurately they can work vs. how students can be integrated to learn mathematics. 

I was in Fourth Year High School under K+10 (Grade 10 today, and two more years to go); I always feared that trigonometry would be the reason why I'd never graduate! I always thought of how people would go to Ateneo De Manila, the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University, etc., because they had good grades. I didn't do well, and I often heard that being in a good university like ADMU was a recipe for success, even though one of my classmates told me that she had an auntie who graduated from ADMU but refused to work. I heard that there were summa cumlaudes in super hard-to-enter universities who never did anything meaningful with their lives. I simply, in a strange way, dismissed it as false comfort because it was one of the toxic lessons learned in schools.

I almost didn't graduate high school under K+10. However, I didn't have such problems in college. I took an Associate in Computer Science course where I realized that a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology was never meant for me. However, I still had that pessimism because I heard about the demand for BSIT abroad. I seriously wanted to move abroad, viewing the Philippines as a hopeless case. I thought about migrating to America for good, perhaps even getting a blonde wife, and never returning to the Philippines. However, I'm still stuck in the Philippines, where I wonder if it's still worth being in the Philippines. 

We need to face the hard reality of the job market 

It's time we need to think about the reality of the job market. Sure, there are some people who get bad grades as a byproduct of bad behavior. However, some people get bad grades for other valid reasons like family trouble, family pressure to live up to the legacy, learning disabilities, and the like. I thought about that in college; I didn't get summa cumlaude but I didn't have several back subjects either. I actually finished on time by taking summers in between. I thought about some people who were actually looking for jobs.

I thought about some people who were candidates for warning slips in high school during the K+10 era, including myself. Some people even got held back. However, I thought about how some of them are currently working office jobs and not doing the jobs we were threatened with, respectful of menial work, and the like. I don't think the job market was asking for their elementary to high school report cards. They were merely asked for their transcript of records. Some of them may have admitted they didn't do well in school. Some people I knew who were honor students were never expected to get a throne of gold. Instead, I thought about how someone even shifted from BS Med Tech to BS Nursing, graduated on time, and went to Chong Hua Hospital, without any delusion that he would get an "instant promotion" because of his high school grades. Another one graduated summa cumlaude from a difficult course but never expected an instant promotion either. 

Atlantic International University

The hard reality is that the job market cares more about how teachable people are, honor student or not. A consistent honor student who is a summa cum laude in a difficult course like civil engineering (and may have graduated from ADMU) can't expect to be the head engineer. Instead, the engineer has to go through the job like every other engineer; graduating summa cumlaude from ADMU doesn't mean he has to get the head job right away. Just imagine the shocker when those who were told that those who don't study well are going to be in those high places where they could fall down got the engineering degree from ADMU. Those engineers would have to do stuff like site inspections, high-rise projects, and safety rules. They would have to work with the carpenters, who they were told, "If you don't study hard, you will be like them." They can't just sit down at the air-conditioned office they were promised if they studied hard all day and didn't check the integrity of the structure. Even more, they realize that they need to treat the construction workers with respect if they expect the building to be finished. 

Right now, this isn't a call for students to just take school lightly. Instead, this is a call to reform the education system from elitism to practicality. In reality, getting good grades under a poor education system doesn't say much. It doesn't signal life success. It shows more about how students get good grades only because they were good at memorizing and regurgitating information. In fact, some honor students may admit, "We didn't learn much and the real problem was the system."