The child that we honor
Around this time every year, many of our provinces celebrate the feast of the Sto. Niño. This means parties, colorful costumes, even parading and dancing with images of the child Jesus.
The January homilies usually talk about the gift of childlikeness, of being humble and open, of acknowledging that one cannot control everything. Many of these homilies, or the prayers that follow, shift naturally to the need to honor children, to shape a world in which they can thrive even when we, their elders, are no more.
The 2026 national budget for education is historic, and it might help build such a world: P1.345 trillion, or 4.4 percent of our gross domestic product. The Second Congressional Commission on Education report, however, is also alarming.
Reviews of our education system show that students’ functional literacy and skills are plummeting fast. Many lack the most basic skills of numeracy, reading comprehension, and writing. This translates to a population that is increasingly losing its ability and confidence to speak and reason—one that might one day be unable, or unwilling, to examine issues, question authority, or speak out against wrongdoing.
I constantly talk to my undergraduate students about their basic education experiences. Our discussions are meant to surface how education can impart habits and ways of thinking that can hamper learning much later. Over the years, our discussions have become therapy sessions: many students feel burned out because they were given more information to digest, with little time to do so, and with tests that felt empty of meaning.
I heard more from a recent conversation with a fellow faculty member. His child has a textbook for nearly every subject, he says, but in all the years she has been in school, she has never finished any textbook to the very end. He saw that the end of each textbook would always connect directly to the next textbook, in the next school year.
So what happens when work on the previous textbook remains unfinished? Students don’t only have incomplete skills and information when they reenter school. They also don’t have the scaffolding on which new skills can be built, and through which new information can be understood. Instead of becoming a space for processing knowledge, school turns into an exercise in catching up to a moving target.
K-12 was meant to give extra years for students to process what was already a congested curriculum. Instead, the new curriculum was packed with even more content that teachers couldn’t cover completely because they had to teach skills that should have been built years before. It was filled with more lessons that students couldn’t understand because they didn’t have the necessary background to do so.
By the time they got to university, my students had lost the desire to learn more—they had lost their childlikeness and curiosity and saw school as a checklist of tasks to be completed.
Sadly, those of us who work in higher education are expected to reform the students who come from this broken system. We are asked to turn them into writers, thinkers, and public speakers, as though such skills could just be transplanted in mere months.
Across the board, it seems that education means imparting blocks of knowledge. There seems to be no habit formation, no acknowledgment that writing is a skill that is first built through years of understanding the composition of sentences, crafting outlines to examine and articulate one’s logic, and cultivating an openness to critique. There seems to be no recognition of public speaking as a skill that is first built through shaping a student’s confidence, then giving them space to speak.
All these are necessary skills that take years to learn—but they are an investment in pattern recognition, which allows students to acquire a language, exercise numeracy, and even play and understand music.
Education also needs a strong cultural backdrop against which skills and knowledge can grow. All the sciences (natural, physical, and social), mathematics, and the humanities are built on curiosity and questioning. How can education thrive in a culture that teaches children to value obedience, to fear questioning, and to define respect based on age rather than wisdom? How can we expect critical thinking to flourish if the classroom is the only place where such thinking can be exercised, before it is dismissed by families who were raised in discipline founded on silence, even in the face of injustice?
This month, we walk once again with the Sto. Niño. But our children have been made to dance to the tune of songs that never finish. Our systems have forced them to sing back notes they barely had time to learn. Our culture has kept them from growing. Our leaders have stolen from them, and from us.
We have not honored our children. Unless we demand accountability and transparency, and unless we closely monitor how this historic education budget is spent, we will keep dishonoring their future.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
