Cheers of the month

Focusing on the deserving

THANKS TO the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the spotlight was finally put on a different breed of public school teachers—the mobile ones.
“The Department of Education’s ‘mobile teachers,’ or MTs, are not your typical public school teachers,” the Inquirer reported on June 27. “They travel long distances, at times trekking for hours just to reach their target students—out-of-school youth and adults, a majority of whom can neither read nor write.”
In the absence of classrooms, many of these 804 MTs—some of them have been mistaken for military agents if not rebel supporters—“hold special literacy classes under the shade of trees, among other outdoor sites,” said the report.
Some of the MTs interviewed said they doubled as social, health and rural development workers, community organizers, public information officers, and family counselors to help those not reached by the formal school system.
The Inquirer gave a brief history of the growth of MTs in the Philippines which is part of the education department’s “Alternative Learning System” policy, or ALS, a “parallel learning system that provides a viable alternative to the existing formal education instruction, encompassing both the non-formal and informal sources of knowledge and skills.”
According to education secretary Jesli Lapus, without ALS the department would never achieve its “education-for-all targets,” given the limitations of the public school system and the agency’s limited resources.
But there were groups such as the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) and some old-timers in the department who were not impressed with the system, according to the Inquirer. It quoted ACT chair Antonio Tinio who did not agree with the government’s response to the high number of out-of-school youths and adults in the country (“Teachers risk lives in classrooms without borders,” p. A1).

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