Superpinoy?

PINOY KASI
Superpinoy?
By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 01:37am (Mla time) 08/11/2006

Published on Page A11 of the August 11, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE full-page advertisement was eye-catching. It showed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in a Superwoman-Darna-Zsazsa Zaturnah outfit, flying high with Mary Joy Bunol, also in a Superwoman outfit but wielding cooking utensils.

"Supermaids!" the ad proclaimed, to announce latest training program of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda), all part of Arroyo's latest public relations spin, Superpinoy, or Skills Upgrading Program for Employment and Re-employment of Pinoys.

Bunol was featured because the 23-year-old Ilongga had taken one of the training courses and is now serving, and the ad boasts about this in bold letters, a royal family of Malaysia.

Kids, pets and cars

The super-"sobra" [excessive] hype aside, this Tesda program is intriguing. There are several training modules involved, including personality development, home safety, childcare, home management, cooking and care of pets.

Each module is broken down to very specific topics. For example, under personality development, you have topics like personal grooming and communication skills (phone conversations included). Home safety includes handling high-rise, safety-window ladders. Childcare is the most impressive, including a module on child growth, behavior and development and other topics such as choosing age-appropriate toys. Home management includes "washing car," "reading label [sic] and chemical instructions." Cooking includes "table setting: western, Chinese." And care of the pets includes "how to tame domestic animals."

A minimum of 200 hours training earns a National Certificate I, making you eligible to work as a domestic helper and a monthly salary of US$250 to $350. To get a National Certificate II, which makes you a Supermaid, you have to do 235 hours, which could get you a monthly salary of $350 to $450. More ambitious? Then do 270 hours and get a National Certificate III, which makes you a "Household Service Manager/Valet/Governess" eligible for a salary of $450 and up.

I can imagine my professor friends at University of the Philippines and other state universities doing some quick mental calculations now with their salaries. Yes, a governess would get the salary of a full professor.

And why not? If the graduates of this program do become proficient caring for kids, pets and cars, they'd not just be supermaids but supermoms and superdads, or, quite simply, supermen and superwomen.

Back to basics

Many families already have these supermen and superwomen, people who haveworked for years with the same family, some working for a mere pittance, others getting quite good salaries and considered very much part of the household.

I have an aunt who first hired a teenager, fresh from the provinces, almost 50 years ago to work as a gardener. He's still with them and has become a kind of majordomo. He cooks the finest meals, makes appointments for my aunt, hunts for the latest Korean TV soap and, yes, still dabbles in the garden. He earns so much that he flies home to Cebu province, towing Samsonite luggage (OK, borrowed from my aunt). And when one of my
aunt's grandchildren got married some time back, he had a cash wedding gift larger than what some of the official godparents gave.

But these supermen and superwomen pick up their skills on the job over the years, often by trial and error. If they're fast learners, well and good. If malnutrition and infant formula impaired their brain development, then, well, good luck.

Looking at the "supermaid" modules, I first thought: Why can't we have similar programs for helpers who want to serve local households? I know Opus Dei has a training program for domestic helpers.

Then on second thought, I wondered why all this cannot be part of our formal educational system. So many of the topics in the supermaids course are so basic -- for example, cooking and cleaning the house -- that they really should be integrated into our formal educational system, and, this is important, it should be done for both males and females.

All too often, low-income Filipino parents pull their kids out of high school and send them to work, claiming that the schools offer little that's relevant to life. So why not integrate some of Tesda's "superpinoy" modules into the formal high school curriculum? English would probably be better taught as a "communications skills" module (including banishing that "for a while sir" phrase when asking people to hold); math could be more interesting using examples from marketing, cooking and managing one's allowance. Health and science could integrate childcare. Even a pet care module could be taught as part of health and science. We wouldn't have the problem I described in last Wednesday's column of brutal dog slaughtering if Filipino households would just learn about proper and responsible pet ownership.

Too much for our schools? Spread out Tesda's 235-hour curriculum over four years of high school, maybe even two years from elementary school, and you have a very manageable program.

For export only?

The Tesda supermaids program reminds us how export-driven we are when it comes to developing human resources.

Some time back I wrote about how we've been fretting about the brain drain involving doctors and nurses, while forgetting to do something for those who do stay on. We developed a six-month training course to produce exportable caregivers, but have little to offer to upgrade the skills of midwives and "barangay" [village] health workers, the ones who keep our health care system from totally collapsing.

Tesda comes up with this program to produce supermaids but our public schools are stagnating. When an "innovation" does get proposed, it's for something ridiculous like boxing in elementary and high schools.

I get so depressed when I hear parents telling their children to study hard, so they can work abroad. The supermaid program only reinforces this export mentality, with the idea that you should learn first aid and cooking only if you plan to work as a maid overseas.

The competencies named in the supermaid curriculum are stuff our young Filipinos need to survive. If those competencies are properly integrated into our elementary and high schools, we'd then produce graduates ready to tackle more training for higher-paying jobs, instead of going off to work as underpaid supermaids.

I suspect, too, that if we strengthened our elementary and high school curricula to include not just skills but values around national identity and purpose, we could produce a generation of Filipinos who would be better able to care for their families, as well as the nation. Overseas or at home, we'd have our Superpinoys.