Starting classes in August: Will it work?

Jobers Bersales

The demands to finally align the Philippines with the rest of the world, or at the most immediate, with those of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) took on a more concrete phase and face when Ateneo de Manila and the University of Sto. Tomas (UST) announced last week that they were starting classes in the last week of August in lieu of the usually second week of June.

The main reason given is the need to internationalize their academic calendar by matching it with those of Europe, the United States and countries in the Asean region. A corollary reason is purportedly the need to avoid the rainy season, although that has not been specifically said by either of these two universities.

I was at UST the other day to sit as one of three external consultants to the Executive Committee for the 2015 International Conference of the Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC), which will be hosted by UST. (UMAC is one of 35 international committees of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), a former museum arm of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) that was transformed some years back into the world’s largest non-government organization and association of museum practitioners.)

With 44,000 students currently enrolled in all its colleges and basic education department, UST is taking one bold step in its decision to move classes to August. And I believe, like Ateneo, it can afford to do so. Already they are preparing the faculty to report for work in June even without students and instead prepare their lessons and do all kinds of academic work to keep them busy while waiting for August to arrive.

Ateneo and UST are part of the group of 22 that are autonomous higher education institutions that can very well do whatever they please with their institutions, subject to certain standards set by government. University of San Carlos is one of two or three universities in Cebu that also enjoy this status. But USC has not indicated as yet that it will boldly go where others went before and then backtracked.

I am referring to the attempt in 1960 or thereabouts to precisely move the school calendar to August which was quickly shelved the following year after it was proven too difficult to implement as it did not bring in the expected windfall. Now the looming education reforms are upon the country and the “sink-or-swim” principle has been dangled by the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) to all educational institutions. In fairness to Ched, the regulatory body never actually insisted on the need to move the academic calendar to match the rest of the Western world.

Perhaps Ched knows only too well that such a decision will require the exercise of political will on the part of government. With elementary school kids inside classrooms in the soaring heat of summer, temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius in mid-April to mid-May, the need for cooler public classrooms and teaching methods to prevent students from dozing off will be the most immediate challenges. This may be one of the reasons my other alma mater, the University of the Philippines, has decided to take baby steps, starting with seven units across the country including its tiny campus in Cebu to see the kinks that may appear in this set-up.

Already, those doing fieldwork during the Philippine summer months of March, April and May are up in arms, pointing out that, archaeologists, for example, will find it hard to dig from June to mid-August when rains will surely pour on their excavation units, requiring them to dig into their meager budgets to purchase tents and water pumps and making the plotting of soil layers virtually impossible. Water seeks its own level and where someone digs, there water shall pour.

Waterlogged fieldwork and archaeological sites from June to August and super-heated public classrooms from March to May are what this country’s educational system face when indeed we begin to follow the American and European calendar.

My two cents’ worth may not amount to much on this issue but there are two things that numerous studies have revealed will show educational success. And it is not the idea of matching school opening in Germany, for example, with ours. It is when government pours all its resources to fund and support a very talented pool of faculty, both in the private and public universities, to carry out research in various disciplines that push the bounds of universal knowledge forward and when they are funded, to publish these to be internationally recognized and acclaimed that we will get the kind of international recognition our universities yearn for.

That is how the National University of Singapore (NUS) rose to international prominence in barely 20 years. The Singaporean government subsidized its expansion in the 1990s and enticed faculty from Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford, among others—some of them semi-retired but still world-renowned—by offering generous housing benefits, salaries and cars and unlimited research funds to pour out their talents and make NUS land among the top 10 in international surveys. That is how NUS got noticed by the early 2000s. Definitely not because it starts its classes in August. Besides, whoever said that the rains and floods only happen from June to late August probably forgot that the most devastating typhoons that visited this country during the last four years have all happened in November, right when students at Ateneo and UST will then be about to take the midterm exams of their first semester.