“The function of education is to provide solutions—to provide hope,” implored Hon. Bong Belaro Jr. as he illustrated the prospects of education in a post pandemic world. A world that has been crippled from the rampage of COVID-19 that has wrought loss after loss in the education sector—a long laundry list if you ask the former party-list representative.
The past two years have provided students a front row to the morbid scenery of scientists and medical experts scrambling to find solution after solution as frontliners worked tirelessly to keep the sick alive and to ease the passing of the ones near-dead. Education has taken the back seat, patiently hoping for scientists as they rush to discover seemingly unreachable breakthroughs—all under a ticking human clock as death tolls rise with every second passing.
None of this escaped the watchful eyes of students around the world—with their lives placed on hold. From PCR test kits, to rapid antigen test kits, to finally the long-awaited COVID vaccine, students have seen something hardly seen before in this grand of a scale: solutions and plans in action with too many things at stake. What before was simple words typed out in newsprint books became real-life realities with equally grave consequences.
Stressing the importance of solutions in education, Hon. Bong Belaro Jr. stated, “In the light of this impact of the pandemic on the education sector, what can we do? I think that is the question—that is the proper vantage point. What can be done?” Former representative Belaro further argues that education becomes the gateway and hope to finding these solutions—to discovering them. It becomes the ladder that enables scientists to discover the unknown and for researchers to open formerly closed doorways.
But where does the impartment of solutions start? In the lessons learned by students. Mirrored in the ten point legislative agenda of 1-Ang Educasyon Party-list, it starts with solutions being imparted in basic education with lawmakers supporting ideas that could effect change and solve existing problems in our educational system.
Sir Ken Robinson once argued that “schools kill creativity,” yet creativity is paramount in creating novel solutions and without it, the future is left with unimaginative, dry and ineffective ideas. As argued by Hon. Belaro, there is a need for more “proactive vantage points” both in the classroom and in the legislative offices in the education sector in our post-pandemic world. The pandemic has proven to be a true-to-life exhibit showing the need for solutions in our educational sector—and the need for change as our world begins to walk on its own two feet once more. •
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