NCAE: For when dreams exceed one’s grasp Raul Pangalangan Inquirer
January 26, 2007
LAST week, 1.8 million high school seniors nationwide took the National Career Assessment Examination (NCAE) to find the match between their skills and career paths, in a job market that we scarcely control and in a culture where we value the diploma and not the learning. Nonetheless, the Department of Education has done well to initiate this exam, but there are hurdles to overcome along the way.
First, the parents. They are the educators’ allies in every stage of schooling, except at the moment when the kids choose their careers. Then the hidden ambitions, the fallen dreams and the pent-up anxieties all surface. I recall the scene in “The Godfather 3” in which Don Michael Corleone wanted his eldest son to be a lawyer but the boy wanted to sing, well, the “Theme from the Godfather.” Don Michael told him: Go to law school, become a lawyer, and then if you still want to sing, go ahead, but if your singing career doesn’t work, then you have a profession to fall back on.
To borrow the words of Elton John, how many “sons of lawyers, sons of bankers” (and hereabouts, sons and daughters of doctors) will be forced into careers chosen by their parents? How can the NCAE avoid the mismatch between talent and ambition, when talent is merely God-given while ambition is parent-chosen? Guess who prevails.
Second, obsessions and stereotypes. There was a sharp increase in law school enrollments in the United States when the 1980s TV series “LA Law” first hit the screen. I haven’t kept abreast of all the law- or medicine-related shows, but I imagine young kids being driven by idealized but rarely accurate images. Often, they see the creative and thus exciting part, but not the sheer drudgery of day-to-day life as, say, a law student or medical resident.
For medical schools, there are in fact two cases in which applicants that flunked the National Medical Admission Test went all the way to the Supreme Court to assert their right to dream of becoming doctors. (They lost, the justices apparently scared to become one of their patients.) Fortunately, last week’s NCAE poses no bar, no cut-off, no disqualification, and aims merely to guide and forewarn.
Third, diploma fetish. To his credit, Sen. Edgardo Angara, a former president of the University of the Philippines and long-time chair of the Senate committee on education, long ago pushed for the development of vocational and technological schools, a shift away from the fetish for universities and all they stand for -- the glamour, the chic, the fancy-schmancy talk. In all candor, that is the world I know as a UP law professor, the same world that Angara knew too well as UP president. But I agree with him that what the Philippine economy needs are able men and women with practical skills to fill the jobs that industry demands. A Third World economy can use only so many men and women who can distinguish epistemology from epidemiology but can’t change a flat tire.
Unfortunately, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has created so many new universities, accommodating every politician who wants a university named after his "ninong" [godfather]. In the United States, these “universities” would rank no better than community colleges or, at best, teaching colleges (more felicitously called “liberal arts colleges,” of which there are fine examples). What the CHED needs is a higher vision of education. They just ain’t got it.
Fourth, the job market and the ever-moving goalposts. It is difficult enough to develop an exam to find a kid’s job aptitude, but try predicting what jobs he can aim for once he graduates. Ten years ago who would have thought that there would be a market for those who can talk like DJs, those who can affect an American accent? Come to think of it, the "cońo kids" cornered the market for "colegiala" and "colegialo" [Catholic school] English, the clipped singsong that the educated Filipino passed off for true class. Until, that is, the call centers exposed it as the patois of the "burgis" [bourgeois] wannabe.
On the same day that the papers reported the NCAE, the headlines also blared, “China next major destination of Filipino workers,” and, mind you, they referred to high-skilled labor like doctors, nurses, engineers, architects, lawyers and accountants, all poised to partake of China’s economic boom. The other lead story was, “9 out of 10 Singaporeans fear losing jobs to foreigners.”
If the Department of Education wants to program the supply of Filipino labor to meet the demand, it cannot limit itself to the Philippine market. For instance, we are stuck with so many “universities,” which are in turn fed by money remitted by overseas Filipino workers. Let us make the best of the situation and cultivate the market abroad for the artistic and creative Filipino. Let us find a niche in those societies that had been so repressed that they turn to other nations for work that requires imagination and color. Surely those of us who thrive amid chaos can make money out of those among them who can’t.
I know a young boy from a poor family who, to my delight, qualified as a Physics major in University of the Philippines. But he eventually dropped out, and when I asked his father why, apparently the boy had some difficulty in his sophomore year, lost his scholarship and, in order to re-enroll, was required to refund his earlier subsidies, a legal way of saying, “Get lost.” Last I heard, he was working in a factory, possibly a future Filipino J. Robert Oppenheimer sentenced to the assembly line.
Maybe it has less to do with aptitude and more to do with fate, and when it comes to our common destiny, I join Mao in saying, “Seize the day, Seize the hour.”
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