By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
I was invited a few days ago by the SM people to go and witness the signing of its Memorandum of Agreement with the University of the Cordilleras. It aroused my interest as it was about an apprenticeship or internship system. An arrangement was agreed upon for UC students to be able to have their internship at SM City Baguio. It naturally follows that if the interns will do good during their stint at SM, the latter just might employ them.
My Spiritual Guru’s idea of a college education should be equally theoretical and practical. In some cases, it should even be more practical.
As he put it, in the two semesters of a school year, one should be for theoretical learning and then the next semester should be apprenticeship. As apprentices, the students should be given the chance to practice what they learned in the previous semester. They would then appreciate the value or origins of the theories drummed into their brains by their professors. Most important, however, is it should be a chance for the interns to earn money for their tuition and other expenses during the upcoming semester. This way, even the poor will have a chance to get to college or learn some skills to make them become employable.
Can such program be implemented here? I highly doubt it.
I learned that even internship programs of universities have to go through the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). They have to approve it. Well, if the CHED were creative and competent in fulfilling their mandate to improve our educational system, college graduates should be better now than how they were many years ago. But it is the reverse.
Of Course, that is from my perspective. More than a decade ago, we were receiving journalism or masscom interns from all the colleges around and from other regions. Some universities in the Ilocos Region and in the Cagayan Valley used to send us interns during the summer. These were graduating students. They just had to finish their internship and they would be sent off as college graduates.
After a number of years, we stopped accepting interns. The main reason was their outputs were so bad. These needed a lot of work to make them publishable. But the interns had to have some work published.
Thereafter, I would refer internship applicants to other outfits. I thought this outfit was the only one doing that. Later, after some years, there was a gathering of print media practitioners where internship was one of the topics discussed. I found out that the other media firms were also refusing interns. As one editor said, the universities were sending interns not to practice what they learned. They were thrown out to go out to the world to learn what they, the universities, failed to teach them, but should have.
This is not an indictment against the universities. It is against the whole system. The fault started from elementary years all the way to college. Thus, as I found out, many of the graduating masscom students could not even come up with passable articles for publication.
Well, their parents who were their teachers during their formative years should also share the blame.
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