BY JUAN T. GATBONTON EDITORIAL CONSULTANT 6 June 2010 The Manila Times The school crisis is on us once again. Everyone’s agitated about crowded classrooms; the lack of teachers; not enough textbooks. All tough problems, certainly, but not even the key ones. The more intractable problem we don’t talk about: it concerns the children who never even get to school—or who drop out before they’ve received enough formal learning to function in a modern society. Out of every 100 Filipino children of the right age, roughly 10 never enter a classroom at all. And out of every 100 children who do, 14 drop out before they reach Grade 2. (In early 2009 Pulse Asia reported 26 percent of all Filipinos having no formal education or no more than an elementary education.) Almost unavoidably, these children will grow up to join the ranks of our hard-core poor. In 2009-10 the primary-school participation rate was 86.5 percent. For high school, it was 65.8 percent. The Jesuit educator Bienvenido Nebres calls...