Nearly two years into the pandemic, it is quite safe to say that the Philippine education system remains to be in a sorry state.
One particular dilemma many students had before the beginning of the previous academic year was having to decide whether they would enroll or take a break. Enrolling was deemed as a risk—would you spend the same amount of money and exert the same level of effort in an education system that guarantees mediocre outcomes, or would you rather lay back and see how everything goes before figuring out whether you would resume schooling the following year? In a society where being an irregular or failing to graduate on time is looked down on, the former option seemed to be easier—one that many took the past year.
At a point of no retreat and no surrender, schools and colleges all over the country devised and employed various strategies to ease the burden brought by the sudden shift to online modality. The Ateneo de Zamboanga University, for instance, split the regular semesters into two “sessions” to halve students’ study loads and teachers’ workloads. Teachers were encouraged to make the most out of asynchronous sessions to keep students occupied throughout the rest of the week apart from the three hours of synchronous sessions. This was intended to maximize the seven weeks allocated for each session.
What ensued in the following months was quite different from planned. While some teachers strived to make the most out of each session, meticulously planning every activity for each day, others barely made use of asynchronous sessions. With little to no contact outside the weekly three-hour meetings, the setup was reminiscent of regular in-person classes, except the subject in its entirety had to be finished in merely seven weeks. At the turn of the new academic year, perhaps the most evident changes in AdZU’s system were the addition of two weeks to the length of each session—making it nine weeks long, and the fixed mental health breaks in between sessions.
Students now are more exhausted than ever. Elsewhere, there has been an increasing number of calls for academic breaks from various universities—the evidence of students’ frustrations and fatigue. This is where most people thought students were well-adjusted to the online setup. For some students, sitting in front of a device and listening to a lecture for three hours straight is the least of their problems. It is having to strive independently in pursuit of new knowledge beyond the condensed syllabi that is making them tired—all the more reason to believe that no form of compromise would be able to make up for the insufficiencies of online classes.
Which leads us to the question: is the problem in the delivery of education and learning modality during the pandemic? Or, is it in the existing education system that has failed to train us to improve our skills in independent learning? To say that the problem is in both areas is not exactly wrong.
Students are very much familiar with the concept of teachers as ‘facilitators’ of learning. By the time they reach the tertiary level, students are expected to do the bulk of learning on their own, employing various strategies or techniques suited to their preferences. In situations such as these, independent learning has been regarded as an essential skill. The way things are now, however, seems to show that students aren’t exactly ready for the ‘I’ in RIGHT Learning after all.
While we clamor for a more efficient and effective delivery of education in the pandemic, hopefully, our educators would be able to realize that maybe students have become too accustomed to the basic education style of learning where they’re always spoon-fed and looked after. To be fair, nobody expected the pandemic and its effects on our education systems. But the longer we dwell in the situation, the more lessons and realizations we can pick up to build a better and more reinforced system for the future.//
Zacharee Quezon-Masamayor is a BA Communication student and editor-in-chief of The BEACON.