The Artemios of Rural High Schools 

For poor peasants in the countryside, “lakad power” (walking) is one of the most popular ways of going to school. Children, like 12-year old Artemio Manglinong, have to walk across two kms of rice paddies, dirt roads and creeks to reach the nearest school – located in the next village. 

BY JHONG DELA CRUZ
NORTHERN DISPATCH
Posted by Bulatlat 

URDANETA CITY — For poor peasants in the countryside, “lakad power” (walking) is one of the most popular ways of going to school. Children, like 12-year old Artemio Manglinong, have to walk across two kms of rice paddies, dirt roads and creeks to reach the nearest school which is in the next village. 

Artemio is a candidate for graduation this March.  Despite being one of the sharpest students in class, he however did not make it to the honor roll due to several absences and missed class activities. He is often forced to cut classes to look after younger siblings whenever his parents are out in the field working. 

Like the other youngsters in his barrio, he juggles domestic chores and studying. 

Acclaimed educator Dr. Pedro T. Orata went through the same experience that led him to become a champion for accessible education. 

After the liberation in 1945, Orata campaigned for the democratization of the access to education at all levels for poor peasants. He began this project by transforming a roofless church to the first community high school outside the provincial capitol in the Philippines. He thus became instrumental in the creation of the Barrio High School Movement. 

Last Feb. 4, the legacy of Dr. Orata was recalled in the 60th founding anniversary of Pangasinan’s Provincial East High School, now known as Urdaneta City National High School. The provincial school accommodates over 4,000 enrollees every year. It has 160 teachers and employees. Under it are 18 former barrio high schools.   

Post-war education  

The Japanese-American war left the country in ruins.  School buildings were destroyed or were used as soldiers’ barracks. The public high schools at that time were located mainly in provincial capitols. Students from far-flung villages thus had to travel long distances by foot. 

In the effort to restore the public school system after the war, Americans recruited Filipino educators to work for them. In Urdaneta, a certain Captain Kramer asked Orata to open a school for the locals. 

The 35 senior students who enrolled in a three-month curriculum taught by professionals in town, graduated in April 1945, receiving handwritten diplomas. 

In 1948, Dr. Orata joined an activity organized by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in Paris to observe learning conditions in some countries after which he came up with a catalogue on educational trends around the world. 

It was only in 1971 that the Philippine Congress passed the Barrio High School Charter, regulating rural high schools and giving them official recognition for operation. 

Schools in the barrios 

According to the 2000 data of the education department (DepEd), there are about 40,000 public schools in over more than 45,000 barangays (villages) in the country.  Around 4,000 of these are secondary schools operating in rural areas. 

In 2004, the government allotted a meager P104.6 billion for the education sector to cover necessities and augment shortages in classrooms (39,383), seats (4.12 million), textbooks (9.88 million) and teachers (49,212). 

In the country, 60 students are made to fit in one classroom as compared to Thailand (18), Malaysia (19), China (24), Taiwan (14) and Indonesia (22). To address classroom scarcity, the government is set to allot P3.2 billion for additional 8,000 classrooms and to reduce about 20.31 percent of the shortage. 

The lack of classrooms is not the only problem for schools in the barrio, however. Those existing suffer from deficient ventilation (20 percent), lighting (27 percent), electricity (55 percent) and ceilings (25 percent). The DepEd added that 22 percent of public elementary and high schools do not have science laboratories. 

In remote areas in Visayas and Mindanao, students are even forced to bring their own chairs and share only one set of textbooks. 

Then there is the much-criticized Bridge Program. 

The Bridge Program, which was declared optional due to protests, is a “refresher course” for students who failed to pass the High School Readiness Test given by DepEd, screening the 1.4 million incoming high school freshmen.  It is intended to provide intensive review in English, Math and Science subjects for a year.   

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said a family would need an additional P8,000-10,000 a month or P39-P48 a day to cope with the additional school year that the program is imposing. 

According to statistics, if Artemio gets to finish high school, he may be among the four out of seven students who will enroll in college.               

Poor man’s resolve 

Asked how the late Dr. Orata would have replied to these problems, Dr. Teofidez Calvero, a retired president of a community college here and a confidant of Dr. Orata said, “Start where we are, with what we have and build upon it as we go along,” 

Calvero said, “The marginalized sector wallowing in poverty and ignorance concerned Dr. Orata practically his entire professional life. To be empowered by education by having access to whatever modest facility and structures though deficient, maybe tolerated at the start to make a beginning.”  

Some of Dr. Orata’s contribution to the public school system are the democratic method of school supervision, making use of cheap resources to alleviate the barrio economy, converting schools to educational complexes with laboratories, libraries, among others. 

Proof of his compassion for the poor was when he received the highly-regarded Ramon Magsaysay Award for community service in 1971. The $10,000 award money was converted to a trust fund, the interest from which was invested in a piglet project from where aspiring scholars loaned to support their schooling. 

In the current state of Philippine education, children like Artemio go through a lot to acquire decent education. But they would find the road to good education getting narrower and steeper and persistence is the only light that could guide their way.  Nordis / Posted by Bulatlat

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