Another shortage

**media[15843]**MEDIUM RAREA few days before graduation day, the beautiful Miss Teresa Miller, our teacher in English, wrote in my autograph book: “Be good, but not ever so tiny.”So many greetings, so much good will from classmates and other teachers, but that one from Miss Miller took the cake.Another teacher, Professor Mrs. Serrano, a few years later when I was in college, used me as her model for Juliet and Ophelia when the class was discussing Shakespeare’s greatest and most famous tragedies – just because I was the tiniest in class.Reading what Education Secretary Sonny Angara said last week about a shortage of classrooms – 165,000 until the next 30 years -- I remembered how short I was when I was young. I’m no longer young, but I’m still no taller than what I used to be, in school. Maybe shortage is, as the second syllable seems to imply, an age (as in middle age, old age)?A shortage of classrooms? Thank goodness there are enough mango trees and acacia to hold classes under their spreading foliage. Thank goodness there are computers and there’s learning-from-home. In the meantime, changes have been going on that suggest only grade and high schools can afford to stay “exclusive” to one gender. By the time the kids are ready for college, their parents would’ve spent enough money to take a step back and realized that higher studies need not be a luxury, that college in a co-educational institution is just as good. (Why co-ed is cheaper, I cannot say.) If parents are transferring their kids from private to public schools because the soaring costs are no longer suitable to their budgets, that would be a good reason for Secretary Angara to worry.For some time now, schools that were exclusively for boys have been accepting girls, and maybe vice-versa. Not because of their newfound broadmindedness, but because when enrolment numbers fall, budgets for teachers and nonteachers, for noneducational services, etc. will take a hit. Are co-ed institutions in better shape, financially? Logic, instead of logistics, should have the answer. In the first place, is there any scientific proof that schools exclusively for one or the other gender are better, or better off, than co-ed institutions? Let their alumni/alumnae speak up.