The de-skilling of our young

A STRANGER sight you couldn't imagine. One of my aunts woke up one morning to find her helper out in the garden, watering the plants. Nothing extraordinary there, except that the helper was struggling, trying to handle the water hose with one hand while using the other to keep an umbrella over her head.

My aunt asked why she had an umbrella and got this reply: "Because, ma'am, it's raining."

Stories of domestic helpers' gaffes are a dime a dozen, but this one of watering the garden in the rain, with an umbrella, was especially striking. My aunt lamented: "The day she arrived, she made it a point to tell me she had done a year of college and was well qualified. But, Mike, I'm finding that we're getting more of these younger helpers who have finished high school or done a bit of college but are a far cry from the older ones who may have only finished Grade 2."

College but de-skilled

It's a point well made about a growing problem we have among young people in general, whether they enter the labor force as domestic helpers, factory workers or office clerks. Educational attainment may be increasing, thanks in part to free public secondary education, but we have to be asking ourselves if the high school or even college diploma really means someone is prepared to meet life's challenges.

My view is that we're witnessing a massive, and dangerous, de-skilling of young people. When it comes to practical skills, rural youth have turned their backs on the farms, and on traditional work, including household basics, seeing all this as menial work. Urban youth may be plugged into the information revolution, but their skills are limited to texting and managing computer games. And generally, we see a generation that's reading less, thinking less.

The de-skilling of our young is probably worse with males because they are so privileged at home -- by their mothers, sisters, girlfriends and wives. The other day one Ateneo professor told me this is particularly bad in one Central Luzon province (guess which one), where the women actually crack pakwan or watermelon seeds for their men. I'm being frivolous, of course, when I say that one of the skills being lost among men is pakwan-cracking. There are far more important skills they're losing, so it's not surprising to find, especially in urban households, idle, jobless men who can't find work and who are not very useful either at home.

Just to be more concrete, I'll share with you the story of a male college student who was working for someone part-time as an all-around Man Friday. One day, his employer told him they were going to start to compost kitchen waste. The employer brought out some flower pots and soil, explaining that the kitchen waste goes into the pots and then gets covered with soil. After a week, the curious employer went to check the pots and found they were filled with kitchen waste... still in plastic bags. Even more shocking was that out in the garden, there were several more plastic bags under the trees, the student proudly explaining he had done this to hasten the compost production, with the compost going directly to the trees.

Common sense?

Mind you, this was a UP student who had grown up in a rural area, but had no idea of how plants grow, how organic matter decomposes. And yes, I guess there was no common sense as well.

Common sense isn't instinctive. It has to be acquired. And we're not doing enough to cultivate this in homes or in school. Partly I think it's because our priorities have become so distorted, our main objective being to get our young into diploma mills so they can be exported to handle mechanical work.

Parents urge their kids to finish high school so they can work abroad and earn dollars. The kids in turn see all the returning overseas workers, including the japayuki, toting the latest models of cell phones and electronics and Marlboro and Johnny Walker. I'm therefore not surprised when young girls in middle-class and urban-poor areas in Quezon City, where I'm doing research, tell me: "Why go to college when you can go to Japan with a high school diploma?"

Indeed. Young urban girls do pick up skills, to survive in the streets, to be wily and charming. And the men? It could be worse.

In my research, I found one young male whose wife was working in Japan while he was jobless, living off her remittances. He had two of the latest cell phones-and a mistress.

The young men boast and compare notes about who's the "smarter" one with their women.

'Señorito, señorita'

Let's get back to Inday who was watering the plants in the rain. Her employer had another observation: "I have to say that with this new crop of helpers, they at least know how to dress, and to answer the phone. Why, they could pass off as a colegiala (a student at a private girls' school)."

What we're seeing here is the señorita complex. In the Philippines, "señora" is used as a term of courtesy and deference to a rich woman, and "señorita" refers to their daughters. Being "señorita" means dressing up, strutting around like a model on the catwalk, even learning to modulate one's voice. Which is all fine, except that being a señorita also means a disdain for work, especially work seen as menial.

In Thailand, in Indonesia and in Vietnam, I find more women driving motorcycles, carrying around heavy boxes -- work that our señoritas would consider degrading, "unfeminine" and well, "un-señorita."

I've written in the past about our men tending to be señoritos, but I'm now convinced we are afflicted as well with an equivalent for women, and unfortunately, you see this even in the poorest of households, which means both daughters and sons hanging around at home, refusing to take up certain jobs, or doing poorly at them because they think it's beneath their status.

It's time we exerted more effort, in homes and schools, to reverse this trend and explain that one's status isn't tied so much to the cell phone model you have as with honest labor, no matter how "menial," no matter how routine.