Losers, winners September 7, 2006
THERE were a couple of seemingly unrelated stories on our front page last Monday and Tuesday.
The first told of the ordeal of Elmer Jacinto, the topnotcher in the 2004 medical board exams. He dismayed a great many of his compatriots by choosing to work as a nurse in New York instead of as a doctor in Lamitan, Basilan, where he hails from, or any part of this country. New York, however, proved more brown than green for him, or the Big Apple turned out to have a worm in it, courtesy of a recruiting agency which reneged on virtually everything it promised, from comfortable quarters to decent pay. Jacinto and several other Filipino nurses, themselves mostly MD holders in the Philippines, have filed a suit in New York to renounce their contract with the recruiting agency and its US partner.
The second story told of several big businessmen lamenting the absence of a qualified Filipino workforce to meet the needs of local business. "Most graduates are not well-prepared for the realities of the job market," says Alfred Ty, president of Metrobank Foundation. "The needs of industries and college preparation do not match and continue to drift apart."
The problem, says Lance Gokongwei, is that graduates are ill equipped in English and Math. "It's sad that there are many college graduates who now can't even speak a straight sentence in English, much less write one."
And Lucio Tan says the problem is political will. "There was a time in the mid-'50s when the Philippines was in the same league as Japan economically and academics-wise. Fifty years down the road, we are not only lagging behind, we are almost dead last in the Asean region. Our leaders and educators know what went wrong, they just don't have the political will to correct the mistakes of the past."
Well, first off, Tan shouldn't really be drawing too much attention to the mistakes of the past. He contributed mightily to them. Gokongwei is right to say that the problem of the lack of qualified graduates began during martial law when the regime became preoccupied with security rather than education and diverted huge sums to it. He might have added that the economy also went into a tailspin from cronyism, most of the cronies doing nothing with their behest loans but live lives of kitschy ostentation. The practice did not disappear afterward, it became a staple. Tan talks too loudly about correcting the mistakes of the past, Pidal might be sorely tempted to collect his back taxes.
I don't know that poor English is really a problem. You can't have worse English speakers than the Chinese and Thais. You need no further proof of the first than the blurbs in the covers of your favorite pirated DVD. The English there is absolutely atrocious -- not to speak of absolutely droll, the manufacturers of the pirated stuff putting out as blurbs savage commentaries about the movie by critics. Yet China is now poised economically to take over Asia and the rest of the world, to the chagrin of Japan and the United States. And Thailand, which used to send students here to study at University of the Philippines' College of Agriculture in Los Baños, is now a tiger to our lamb or dragon to our mouse. A language exists to allow people to communicate with each other, not merely to findwork. The second in any case is dependent on the first: A people cannot communicate with each other, it will never be able to find work. Or more importantly, create one.
I disagree that current education and jobs do not jibe. In fact, the opposite is true, which is the problem: Current education and jobs do jibe. Lest it escape notice, even the most respectable local universities are turning whole wings into nursing departments. During Sister Mariani's wake last year, I was astounded to learn that St. Joseph College's excellent music department (Lea Salonga developed her talents there as a kid) had become just that, a nursing wing. The entire educational system no longer exists to educate, it exists to find work for students -- abroad. The entire educational system is blindly obeying the law of supply and demand. It's probably true that current education and local jobs do not jibe. But local jobs are no longer the priorities of students.
Which brings me to Jacinto and company. The two stories are only seemingly unrelated, they are in fact related by the surest of links, which is cause and effect. The problem is that the entire country, and not just the educational system, is now geared toward producing people who can work abroad, whatever work is available and whatever sacrifices need to be made. At the very least that translates not just into a huge drain ofscant brain but a huger drain of scanter resources. This country spends a fortune to produce doctors, only to see them work as nurses in foreign hospitals. How lucky can you get, being an American or Brit who has a nurse with the qualifications of a doctor to attend to you!
The problem is that we have lost all sense of ambition altogether, we are willing to settle for crumbs, comfort ourselves that beggars cannot be choosers, and lug around a loser's mentality. No small thanks to a current government that keeps lowering our already horrendously diminished expectations. We're now even willing to settle for a President we did not vote for.
Ironically, the three representatives of big business above by, of, and in themselves show the solution to the problem. They remind us of the non-joke about the difference between the Filipino and the Chinese-Filipino graduate. The Filipino graduate when he sees another Filipino graduate asks, "What job have you landed?" The Chinese-Filipino graduate when he sees another Chinese-Filipino graduate asks, "What business have you put up?"
The question need not always be how to find a job, it can always be how to create one. That is the differeence between loser and winner.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=19445
The first told of the ordeal of Elmer Jacinto, the topnotcher in the 2004 medical board exams. He dismayed a great many of his compatriots by choosing to work as a nurse in New York instead of as a doctor in Lamitan, Basilan, where he hails from, or any part of this country. New York, however, proved more brown than green for him, or the Big Apple turned out to have a worm in it, courtesy of a recruiting agency which reneged on virtually everything it promised, from comfortable quarters to decent pay. Jacinto and several other Filipino nurses, themselves mostly MD holders in the Philippines, have filed a suit in New York to renounce their contract with the recruiting agency and its US partner.
The second story told of several big businessmen lamenting the absence of a qualified Filipino workforce to meet the needs of local business. "Most graduates are not well-prepared for the realities of the job market," says Alfred Ty, president of Metrobank Foundation. "The needs of industries and college preparation do not match and continue to drift apart."
The problem, says Lance Gokongwei, is that graduates are ill equipped in English and Math. "It's sad that there are many college graduates who now can't even speak a straight sentence in English, much less write one."
And Lucio Tan says the problem is political will. "There was a time in the mid-'50s when the Philippines was in the same league as Japan economically and academics-wise. Fifty years down the road, we are not only lagging behind, we are almost dead last in the Asean region. Our leaders and educators know what went wrong, they just don't have the political will to correct the mistakes of the past."
Well, first off, Tan shouldn't really be drawing too much attention to the mistakes of the past. He contributed mightily to them. Gokongwei is right to say that the problem of the lack of qualified graduates began during martial law when the regime became preoccupied with security rather than education and diverted huge sums to it. He might have added that the economy also went into a tailspin from cronyism, most of the cronies doing nothing with their behest loans but live lives of kitschy ostentation. The practice did not disappear afterward, it became a staple. Tan talks too loudly about correcting the mistakes of the past, Pidal might be sorely tempted to collect his back taxes.
I don't know that poor English is really a problem. You can't have worse English speakers than the Chinese and Thais. You need no further proof of the first than the blurbs in the covers of your favorite pirated DVD. The English there is absolutely atrocious -- not to speak of absolutely droll, the manufacturers of the pirated stuff putting out as blurbs savage commentaries about the movie by critics. Yet China is now poised economically to take over Asia and the rest of the world, to the chagrin of Japan and the United States. And Thailand, which used to send students here to study at University of the Philippines' College of Agriculture in Los Baños, is now a tiger to our lamb or dragon to our mouse. A language exists to allow people to communicate with each other, not merely to findwork. The second in any case is dependent on the first: A people cannot communicate with each other, it will never be able to find work. Or more importantly, create one.
I disagree that current education and jobs do not jibe. In fact, the opposite is true, which is the problem: Current education and jobs do jibe. Lest it escape notice, even the most respectable local universities are turning whole wings into nursing departments. During Sister Mariani's wake last year, I was astounded to learn that St. Joseph College's excellent music department (Lea Salonga developed her talents there as a kid) had become just that, a nursing wing. The entire educational system no longer exists to educate, it exists to find work for students -- abroad. The entire educational system is blindly obeying the law of supply and demand. It's probably true that current education and local jobs do not jibe. But local jobs are no longer the priorities of students.
Which brings me to Jacinto and company. The two stories are only seemingly unrelated, they are in fact related by the surest of links, which is cause and effect. The problem is that the entire country, and not just the educational system, is now geared toward producing people who can work abroad, whatever work is available and whatever sacrifices need to be made. At the very least that translates not just into a huge drain ofscant brain but a huger drain of scanter resources. This country spends a fortune to produce doctors, only to see them work as nurses in foreign hospitals. How lucky can you get, being an American or Brit who has a nurse with the qualifications of a doctor to attend to you!
The problem is that we have lost all sense of ambition altogether, we are willing to settle for crumbs, comfort ourselves that beggars cannot be choosers, and lug around a loser's mentality. No small thanks to a current government that keeps lowering our already horrendously diminished expectations. We're now even willing to settle for a President we did not vote for.
Ironically, the three representatives of big business above by, of, and in themselves show the solution to the problem. They remind us of the non-joke about the difference between the Filipino and the Chinese-Filipino graduate. The Filipino graduate when he sees another Filipino graduate asks, "What job have you landed?" The Chinese-Filipino graduate when he sees another Chinese-Filipino graduate asks, "What business have you put up?"
The question need not always be how to find a job, it can always be how to create one. That is the differeence between loser and winner.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=19445
posted by dqfan06 @ 9:17 AM
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