To Learn Is to Be Motivated

To Learn Is To Be Motivated

Improvement is the word that many Filipinos think about when the topic of Philippine education comes up in a conversation. In Conrado de Quiros’ essay “What’s Education For?” he pointed out that the country has way too many colleges and universities that simply cannot produce quality education and therefore would not produce students who are truly educated. On top of that, the facilities that many schools offer are not particularly “world class”. In this problem we could see that the country produces more mediocre small schools than quality and world class schools. The governing bodies for education in the country namely the Department of Education (DepEd), Commission on Higher Education (CHED), and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), should put into great consideration the quality of facilities each school in this country should have. The country’s schools should have an improvement in its facilities or at least a standard set of facilities required for each school to be able to further motivate the students to do better in school.

Philippine schools are not particularly known to have the best and most beautiful facilities. We are not known to have world class classrooms and campuses. Many of the facilities we can truly call quality can only be afforded by the upper classes of society and this shows the huge divide in class. How can a country be able to think, move forward, and progress without its students having decent facilities? How can a country rely on a student who studies in a classroom that gets constantly flooded? Not only does the government try and mass produce classrooms that have a great lack in quality, but they are also marred by corruption which sees many of the funds lost and causes most of the classrooms not to be built. In a statement made last August 2015, Senator Ralph Recto stated that of the 41,728 classrooms promised to be built over the course of 2015, not a single one has been built as of July 2015 while 7,000 classrooms promised during 2014 has remained unfinished and 43,000 new classrooms promised for 2016. It is safe to say that all, if not most, of these classrooms would not have a healthy learning environment for students. In a study entitled “Designing Classrooms to Maximize Student Achievement”, factors such as temperature, air quality and even acoustics can affect a students performance one way or another. The study concluded that for a student to maximise his or her learning ability, a classroom should have structural quality and more importantly, contain cues that all learners are valued learners. In another study named “Do School Facilities Really Impact A Child's Education?” by John B. Lyons, ventilation is one of the concerns that he would like to address stating that according to the American Lung Association found that asthma is one of the leading causes of school absences. Not only does this show that our country lacks the facilities, but it also shows that it is a worldwide problem. There will always be a divide in the level of education of the upper and lower class. I firmly believe that one of the first steps this country has to make in improving its education system is by first improving the facilities it offers to students to be able to motivate them to learn and strive for more. In 2014, the