The other day, the DepEd conducted a press conference on the health of pupils and students, the construction of school buildings, and other educational programs. In a way it is similar to the programs of other government agencies, in the sense that these are geared to serve more in a better way.
Such, however, will never ever fully address the problems they are intend for if the demand is always getting higher in a geometric way. You put up more school buildings to serve a 100,000 incoming high school students but the next school year there will be more than 150,000 new students who just graduated from elementary. So that nobody will be refused, the solution is to pack more students in classrooms so we now have 60 or more students per classroom when the teacher can only be most effective if there were 40 students or even less under her care. The result, low quality of education.
Similarly, the government builds more hospitals to accommodate a lot more patients, say 50,000 in one city, but as soon as the facilities start operating, the prospective patients in that area have increased by 100,000 or 100% more than what was projected. So even the corridors of those facilities have to be filled with beds for patients.
And we also are building more roads and widening existing ones only for these to become virtual parking areas during rush hours as the cars there could hardly move because of traffic.. There are just so many cars and increasing every time due to the geometric increases in population everywhere in this country.
So the problem is overpopulation. No matter how much we try to improve services and facilities, we will always be outrun by the increase of population and so government services and facilities are always substandard compared to the rest of the world.
The implementation therefore of the Reproductive Health (RH) thrust of the government, which include birth control, must be given top priority among other programs and projects for improvement. Otherwise, we will always remain where we are—in the third world category.**