My daughter Recca is nine, slender and a bit small for her age. One of my daily duties is to bring her to school in the morning, and occasionally take her home in the afternoon when I have no meetings after office hours. When I’m not available, her mother picks her up from school. Most often, we have a haul of two bags – one containing her notebooks and other school supplies, and the other her textbooks. Sometimes, there’s the PE uniform and the sneakers, and some change of clothes.

Whether they carry it in a backpack, in a shoulder bag or in a trolley bag, I believe that with their daily load, schoolchildren are not just taking the meditative via crucis every day but are actually carrying the cross through all the 14 stations. All the notebooks and the textbooks combined can weigh up to four kilos. Even if the child is stout, the experience alone will make the poor kid hate going to school.

Last month, Pampanga Rep. Carmelo Lazatin filed House Bill 6644, otherwise known as Schoolbag Weight Limitation Act of 2009, which aims to promote awareness on the health hazards posed by overweight bags and make necessary measures to avoid such an unhealthful practice. “Health is the most priority for the children and education is nil if the frail bodies of children are compromised,” Lazatin said in a statement announcing his authorship of the bill. The Department of Education will then be required to conduct a nationwide assessment on the issue of overweight schoolbags with the assistance of the Department of Health.

Schoolchildren carrying heavy bags have become a common phenomenon as they bring all their textbooks and other school supplies to school in preparation for classroom discussion and other school related activities. But Lazatin, citing studies, said the overloading of school bags can cause harm to children since their spinal ligaments and muscles are not fully developed until after they are 16. He noted that any bag that weighs more than 15 percent of a child’s body weight is deemed overweight and may cause posture problems among children.

The main reason why schoolchildren are forced to bring their textbooks home is the common practice of teachers of giving them homeworks. The schoolchildren often need to have their books on hand to do this because most of their homeworks are based on what the textbooks say. Instead of taking their rest when they arrive home, schoolchildren would spend time answering the exercises in their textbooks. And it’s not just one exercise in one book. My daughter usually has homeworks in four to five subjects in one day, this is the reason why she has to bring all her books home, and again to school the following day. (This also brings to mind DepEd’s admission in June that most of the textbooks are riddled with errors. But that’s another story.)

Schoolchildren in the Philippines spend a lot of time in school, and I wonder why teachers cannot allot time so they can do their readings and exercises while they are still in their classrooms. While I agree that homeworks serve as an intellectual discipline, establish study habits, and allow schoolchildren to reinforce or apply newly-acquired skills and knowledge independently, they should also be innovative in such a way that the schoolchildren would be utilizing things found at home – a dictionary perhaps, or a newspaper – and out of the clutches of their textbooks.

If, for example, a child learns a new method of solving a mathematical problem, he or she can learn to apply the newly-acquired knowledge with a take-home assignment written on a one-half size pad paper. But the problem is that some teachers nowadays are too lazy to think and would just rely on the exercises found in the textbooks. So, most of the notes I see in my daughter’s Assignment Notebook are just dates and instructions which pages or what exercises she’s going to answer as homeworks. This practice then requires them to bring their textbooks home every day.

Perhaps, the heavy load that our children need to carry daily symbolizes how heavy basic education is – heavy in the sense that while the 1987 Constitution mandates that education should receive the highest priority of the State and that it should be made accessible to everyone, education has remained a burden to parents because of the hidden expenses that it entails. Let’s no longer mention school supplies and uniforms that some politicians provide for free, but the daily cost of transportation, school allowances, food, school projects and even medicines for ailments acquired in schools, among others, continues to exact a heavy toll on the household budget.

This is one major reason why the local survival and retention rates in the elementary remain low: Out of 100 students that enter Grade 1, only 58 go on to high school and only 14 become college graduates, according to the DepEd. Further, the quality of education is also in limbo. A national test on reading given to about a million Grade 6 pupils in 2003, for example, showed that 99.4 percent of those who took the test were unprepared to enter high school. Worse, it was found that the level of proficiency of the Grade 6 pupils was only at Grade 4, and that they could not follow instructions and could not understand the questions well.

These indicate that no matter how many textbooks our education officials will require our children to bring to school every day, the quality of Philippine education will continue to suffer because of misplaced priorities, persistent corruption and sheer inefficiency. And the main victims of this crisis are our children who will not only grow up learning nothing but suffering from backaches and posture problems.

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