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Législations et politiques nationales sur la scolarité payante ou gratuite – Philippines

Le fait que l'éducation délivrée par l’Etat soit gratuite ou payante n’est pas anodin. Tous les pays du monde ont signé au moins un traité international les obligeant à délivrer une éducation primaire gratuite et obligatoire, suivie progressivement par l’enseignement secondaire. L’éducation ne peut pas être obligatoire si elle n’est pas gratuite, mais cette contradiction est trop souvent ignorée. De plus, que signifie exactement la gratuité dans un monde où les apprenants, les parents et les communautés locales supportent une multitude de coûts officiels ou déguisés ? Une enquête de Katarina Tomasevski en 2006 montrait que dans la grande majorité des pays à travers le globe, l’éducation n’était pas réellement gratuite. Les citations concernant votre pays ci-dessous (selon la disponibilité des données) sont extraites de cette importante étude.

 

Les lois et les politiques nationales sont des applications de la Constitution, qu’elles devancent parfois car elles sont plus souvent révisées et renouvelées. Les lois sont faites par le gouvernement, les parlementaires et l’administration, souvent en consultation avec la société civile. Cela les rend vulnérables et soumises à un risque de régression dans la mesure où elles deviennent souvent des instruments au service de visions politiques et de priorités à court terme. Les lois et les politiques sont ouvertes au changement et à l’influence par le biais du processus démocratique et des campagnes de la société civile. Et leurs violations doivent, si possible, être dénoncées devant les tribunaux ou les autorités judiciaires.

 

 

 

 

L’Etat est l’acteur central de toute réclamation relative au droit à l'éducation, il est le premier responsable de sa délivrance, le premier à le mettre en œuvre, le premier garant, le signataire vis-à-vis des normes et des standards internationaux, et il est lié par l’obligation de respecter, protéger et mettre en œuvre le droit à l'éducation. C’est en conséquence l’Etat qui doit être jugé et questionné sur les textes relatifs au droit à l’éducation, qu’il s’agisse de la Constitution, de lois ou de stratégies politiques.

The Constitution of the Philippines obliges the government to ensure that both primary and lower secondary education are free but this has not been translated into governmental policy or into reality. The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) noted in 2005 that primary education was not universalized because it was not available throughout the country. It acknowledged difficulties in ensuring schooling for children dispersed among 7,000 islands but emphasised that education was not universalized because it was not made free. Families bear the cost of “meals, transportation, school uniforms and supplies” and in many schools no enrolment and tuition charges are also levied. An important reason for transferring so much of the cost of education to the family budget is "a chronic budget deficit caused by spiralling demands on an unreformed and hopelessly inadequate revenue base".

An NGO ‘School Report’ has faulted the Philippines for failing to eliminate ‘user fees’ (in the language of the World Bank), which impede universalization of education.

 Internal problems are not the only cause of the government’s inability to ensure free and compulsory education for all children. Conflicts in the allocation of limited resources between debt repayment and education have led to human rights litigation. A group of senators challenged in 1991 the constitutionality of the budgetary allocation of P86 billion for debt servicing which compared to P27 billion for education. The 1986 Constitution of the Philippines obligates the government to assign the highest budgetary priority to education. It obliges the state to provide free public education in the elementary and high school levels and to “assign the highest budgetary priority to education.” The issue to be decided was whether debt servicing, exceeding three times the budgetary allocation for education, was unconstitutional. The Court has found that education obtained the largest allocation amongst all the government departments, as the Constitution required, while debt servicing was necessary for the creditworthiness of the country and, thus, the survival of its economy.

 The economy has survived thus far but the government’s inability to distribute the costs of that survival fairly in the population has encountered many challenges. The Philippine Commission on Human Rights has defined disadvantaged sectors as ‘women, children, youth, prisoners/detainees, urban poor, indigenous people, elderly, Muslims, persons with disabilities, internally displaced persons, informal labour, private labour, migrant workers, rural workers and public sector’. The inclusion of the whole public sector amongst the disadvantaged epitomizes the model chosen to ensure the survival of the economy. This includes teachers, whose inadequate salaries are a bottleneck for improving both outreach and quality of education.

 There is no governmental policy to ensure free primary education. Charges for enrolment and tuition, those for uniforms, shoes, supplies, and transport, and the cost of textbooks place education beyond the reach of most of these disadvantaged sectors. An additional obstacle is the lack of birth registration. Children without it exist neither legally nor statistically. Birth registration is not free of charge, adding yes another financial barrier for the poor. That financial obstacle is compounded by charges levied in public school, which should be but is not free.