It’s the start of the second half of the year! This month may mean many things for various people. For politicians, this means the last month of their three-year-term. For environmentalists, this is Environment Month. For engaged ladies, this is the month to become the June Bride. But for half of the population, especially in Dumaguete, June is the month when everyone else goes back to school.
Signs of June were evident especially last week when people flocked to stores selling school supplies, uniforms, and other paraphernalia. Even earlier on, universities, schools and colleges opened their doors to enrolling students immediately after the elections.
With four universities and seven colleges, Dumaguete is aptly called the University Town. It’s been said that if Dumaguete were a factory, the schools would be the engine; its main product would be students.
But there’s something not quite right in the job market today. Some lucky graduates hit it off by landing in a dream job soon after graduating, but most of them will be working in areas that are far different from the courses they were trained in. They call this a mismatch in the choice of courses with the jobs available in the market today.
Call centers and other Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industries are ever expanding in Dumaguete and yet, despite the many students we produce, we cannot even get a 50 percent hiring rate. The root cause of this problem is that most of the students are not exposed to good English education early on. This is a challenge for our schools today.
Fortunately, technology is on our side. We can improve the quality of education through technology. With the iPad, we can look inside a human body through an interactive app called Gray’s Anatomy — no need for drawings of body parts. We can get easy explanations to mathematical problems and even world history through Khan Academy. We can learn to speak better English, understand the marvels of science, and do many more things through the marvels of information technology.
However, many teachers and even universities are still afraid to venture into this arena, preferring to continue teaching by rote. It will still not be a surprise to enter a classroom and find a teacher rolling out the subject matter in sheets of manila paper.
To improve the quality of our graduates, we must change the way we teach our students. The world is changing. We can either change with it, or be left behind.
