School Should Be My Second Home

By Sabrina Bagatcholon

BSEd-English Student

Foundation is one of the most important components of any structure. Without a solid foundation, the building will wobble and collapse, rendering all the time, effort and money put into the construction of that building useless. Like a building, education must have a solid foundation. As we learned in class, the four pillars of education are, in essence, for personality development, social awareness, honing critical thinking, and utilizing communication skills. Although these are well-established in concept and in thinking, these four pillars are not actually wholly implemented in school curriculums and instead are substituted with old-fashioned, modernist-focused, teaching methods. One might question the usefulness of these four pillars and whether or not they are going to be more effective than the old-fashioned curriculums. One might even suggest that it is better to stick to the old ways, since the education system in this current age is producing professionals just fine, without any problems. However, that is not that case, and I can say that having experienced a grade-oriented system that focuses on academic standing only rather than trying to incorporate assessment or teaching on the emotional and social well-being of the student, I would very much like the four pillars of education to be more implemented in school curriculums across the country.

One of the pillars of education is “learning to live together”. This was not something practiced very much in the school I had been in for only a year back when I was in first year high school. That school is regarded by a lot as “elite” or for only the smart people. “You must be smart then”, would be the most common response elicited by a lot of people whenever I would tell them that I had studied there for a year. Although I had above average grades when I finished there, I’d like to not have a repeat of what happened during my whole stay there. There were a lot of things that went against the four pillars of education, and one of those was placing more importance on grades than on the social situations in the school. I’ve witnessed a lot of my classmates making friendships, then destroying them all because of clamoring to get the highest grades versus each other. I only hope that they realized growing up that grades are not going to last forever, and that relationships with each other should not be taken for granted in place of transient things. The school puts so much emphasis on grades that even when I was being bullied, the principal told my mother that they couldn’t do anything about it and that I should just study harder. It’s ironic that how even though we had a values education subject, I was still bullied because of not being able to speak Tagalog very well and because I had lacked the social skills to properly interact and make friends. I had lacked those skills because I was kind of home-schooled during grade school and I didn’t speak Tagalog until that time in first year high school. The school was so centered on grades that they would section their students by rank. For the first years their entrance exam scores would determine their place in the ranked sections. This kind of practice proved to be very discouraging for a lot of students, especially for the ones in the last section. There were four sections and I was placed in the third. Our teachers told us that those in the first section had the fastest pace of discussion because they were in a different level than us, and the last section would have the lowest because it would match their comprehension and learning abilities. This system, in my opinion, is very inefficient and places a lot of strain on the students. Because of scores from a test to get into the school, they are allocating you in places where they think your intelligence is best suited in. But intelligence is not measured by one test. I don’t think intelligence can be accurately measured at all. Having someone tell you what your worth or what your place in life is based on something that’s not entirely going to be accurate is not education. I felt bad for those in the last section, as they were constantly ridiculed by the other sections for being the last. Getting the last place does not determine who you are, and I can only hope that those in that section never got dragged in despair as they grew up. The ridicule of those students can also be blamed by the lack of proper values and social education in that school. Our values teacher would berate students for going against her teachings because they had differing opinions. Even as a young child, I knew then that that was wrong for someone teaching about values. Not everyone is going to agree with what you say, and it is actually healthy for the students to have differing views from their teachers sometimes because it shows that they are actually thinking about the material given to them. That very same teacher would humiliate students when they couldn’t answer properly. As a future educator, I will not try to humiliate someone in front of the class. It becomes a “me against them” situation and the student will feel cornered. Furthermore, mistakes are only natural and they should be able to learn from it, instead of doing the right thing for fear of punishment. I think most schools with this old-fashioned curriculum have an invisible carrots-and-sticks system that they are not aware of but are actively doing it. Punishment and reward is not an effective learning theory, in my opinion. It makes the student be productive because there is an incentive or because they fear punishment. Education should inspire students to have a positive outlook on school, not force them to learn so they won’t fail. Students should have to want to learn. (Did that make sense?) A student should be educated because they want to, not because of the fear of punishment instilled by their teachers.

Education is an ongoing process to help shape members of our society and to simply educate the people into decent human beings capable of working together while inspiring others to have the same rationality and critical thinking they have in order to help solve problems that we will encounter. I am glad that I left that school after a year, but despite its less than bare minimum values, having a lot of problems means a lot of room for improvement, and I hope that they did improve.