Filipino educators Christopher Bernido and Marivic Carpio-Bernido, the husband-and-wife team who received this year's Ramon Magsaysay Award for their work in providing quality education to poor high school students in Bohol, disagree with the Aquino administration's plan to extend the basic education cycle to 12 years. “If you go from the 10-year to the 12-year cycle, it's like jumping from the frying pan to the fire. It will be a complete disaster,” said Christopher Bernido. He said the debate over the additional two years in the Philippine school cycle just “distracts [Filipinos] from the core problems” that face basic education, such as the lack of quality teachers and resources. The Bernidos, the only educators and the only Filipinos to be named among this year's seven recipients of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards, spoke at a news conference Friday. Other 2010 awardees include a Japanese advocate for nuclear disarmament, three Chinese environmentalists, and a Bangladeshi advocate for the empowerment of differently-abled persons. The annual awards, considered as Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, recognize individuals or organizations that have made extraordinary contributions to human development in the continent. The Bernidos were honored this year for “their purposeful commitment to both science and nation, ensuring innovative, low-cost, and effective basic education even under Philippine conditions of great scarcity and daunting poverty.” Since 1999, the Bernidos have been running the Central Visayan Insitute Foundation (CVIF), a small private high school in Jagna, Bohol. The couple has developed a learning system in which students spend at least 70 percent of their time doing independent activities, and the rest interacting with teachers. Christopher says the DepEd needs to focus on improving the quality of teaching before adding years to the cycle. “It's better to have no teacher than [to have a] bad teacher. Let's repair what's wrong with the 10-year cycle, and then when we are good with it, then we can extend it or even reduce it to eight [years],” he said. “With the lack of qualified teachers, lack of resources, then extending the cycle might compound the problem,” added Marivic. The Bernidos appealed to the DepEd to “give more time to study carefully the issues at stake ... before making any drastic decision, because that decision would entail millions or even billions of dollars. Now, if that doesn't work, then the future generations will be paying off the loans for a failed program.”
