Phoenix Musings

Proof that the Philippine educ system JUST SUCKS BIG TIME

31 October 2007 at 3:10 am (Peeves and Rants)

You’re probably wondering why a post titled that way is in Phoenix Musings and not in Phoenix Eyrie, Reloaded. Is Rob’ just making a post here so Phoenix Musings can be updated?! Crassness!

Ha, ha. No, no. It’s just that, well… I don’t think I’ll be treating the subject matter in a “Mentat” fashion, since this is basically a… rant. Oh yes, bloody frigging HELL this is a rant!

Actually, this is a long overdue rant. Anyone who has seen me in action as EIC outside of the elite circle of writers that used to contribute to Liberal Philippines would know this. Oh yes, if those unlucky enough to have had me as their Editor for KALIPI  press releases and other writeups, even for seminars and workshops, are reading this, they know this all too well.

First, I shall give new readers who don’t know me, or enough about me, a bit of context: I am quite fluent in the English language, despite what some people without any credentials to comment on my capability whatsoever think. I am an English Merit Student of the Ateneo de Manila University. I graduated from grade school Best in English. I was one of the semi-finalists during the Public Speaking Contest of the 19th World Universities Debating Championships.

As such, I have quite the… discerning eye for the English language. Just as having choral training makes me wince at offkey singing (to put it lightly) so do I find it quite the… trial to read stuff whose English is plain… horrible.

Perhaps if the writer was a child, it would have been quite fine. In fact, I’ve seen writeups by kindergartens and grade schoolers and, by God’s Most Sacred Light, their English is damned fine, thank you. The kids aren’t just capable of making sentences (and proper spelling, too!) but able to properly express themselves! Amazing, isn’t it?

Which is why it just… astounds me when so-called college students submit to me such poorly made work. I’m so sorry, but let’s call a spade a godamned spade: it’s really horrible writing! I’ve had writeups where I left it spotless, not because it was an excellent piece of work but because it sucked to the point that even my ability to comprehend even the most haphazardly written piece fails to make heads or tails of the article submitted to me! There is just one note on such a piece: “iho/iha… please rewrite. I just cannot understand a thing.”

What infuriates me is the fact that these are kids who, supposedly, went through six years of basic education and a further four of secondary. At least. God help the farking moron who went through more  – not because his/her school had more years in Basic or Secondary Educ, but due to repeats – and still can’t spell right or even make a coherent sentence in English! I mean, Good Lord and a Half! This isn’t the dark heart of Africa; this is the Republic of the farking Philippines! The only overseas possession of the Americans! We bandy our supposed advantage in being able to coherently converse in English to the farking world, remember?!

Yet, look at young people in college. And I’m not talking about students from so-called “other” colleges and universities; imagine my horror when I asked where a particularly dismal article came from… No, I won’t name the university here. Good Lord, I could see it even among my fellows in the UCSC, and those were supposedly some of the most elite young leaders of the Republic, and from the supposedly-English-speaking private schools, too.

It’s just… so wrong.

Okay. Let’s say the situation is crappy enough with the way teachers in most schools seem to take learning for granted. I suppose you can’t blame the teachers: young people these days seem to think of school as drudgery, or a place to strut. Some of the students these days probably take heart with all these call centers, since the old job requirements appear to not really matter anymore, and you can take any stupid course in college and then get into a call center for a decent salary. Plato would die of horror at the way education has been trivialized in this country.

But despite such a poor foundation in the system, there’s quite a bit of literature out there to salvage quite a bit. Let’s set aside the riff-raff and focus instead on those students that show even a bit of interest in doing justice to their education in college. I see these kids pick up the newspapers. I see them surf the Net (whose lingua franca, after all, is English), and I sometimes see sites that have good English, like top-of-the-line sports and news sites, even ones that deal with fashion and soft porn. Given all this, the level of command of the language should at least be “passable”, by which I mean that I don’t have to sprain my brain cells to understand what the bloody hell a single sentence meant to tell me! And believe me, to sprain a Mentat’s brain cells is quite the achievement!  And some of them supposedly write for a school paper!

I tell kids I train, there is no big secret to learning how to write well (for pete’s sake!). If you read regularly, and not just asinine stuff like those thin romance novels, you have half the “secret technique” down pat. Practice is the other half. The stuff you read is your manual, your guidelines for how things could be done, while practice – usually, we recommend having a diary – allows the wannabe writer to develop not just basic proficiencies and confidence in writing but their own style as well.

Yet, still…

Want to see samples?  Here’s a whole slew of samples. Hope your brain can take it.

Do I sound harsh, callous and bloody arrogant? So farking what? Any person who enters college in the Philippines is assumed to have passed several tests for particular proficiencies, one of which, if I recall correctly, is English! ENGLISH! Yet kids in college, some of which are supposedly smarter than your average student, some of which even have the gall to write for a college paper, practically suck in even the most basic of sentence constructions!

And you know what’s insane? They keep expressing themselves in English! And it… it makes one’s nose BLEED! Has no one bothered to correct these people? Wait: has their horribly made sentences not bother these people? I mean, Good God and a Half, English has one rule for dummies: if it sounds right, then it most likely is right. Like with aeronautics, where a plane that looks good most probably flies good, too. Poor sentence construction, bad tenses… they all sound wrong. Yet people in this farking country keep doing it! And the Philippine Daily Inquirer, with its impeccable English, has millions of readers? Don’t these people get it?

*sigh* Now I feel bad.

But it’s the truth, yes? We pride ourselves with being able to speak at least conversational English. Heck, certainly my lola could, sometimes with an accent better than mine (and she’s fluent in both Spanish and Nihongo, too! Amazing, that generation). There was this really old crone in Batanes that engaged Dr. Ronald Meinardus in a long conversation in perfect English! We were all laughing and having fun with her, that amazing old Ivatan.

So what happened? Why do young Filipinos today suck so badly in a language they are supposedly conversant with? With all the Harry Potter hoopla, did they even understand half of what was written, I mean really understand it and not just read through it so they can be part of the “in” crowd?

Call me evil. Call me a grammar nazi. But my English is impeccable. How’s yours?