LAST week, I wrote about some consequences arising from BBM’s instruction to his Vice-President and Secretary of the Department of Education, Sara Duterte to conduct a review of the current education policy embodied in Republic Act 10533 also known as the K-12 Act.
This week, I shall note my own reactions to K-12 as it applies to the Philippines.
The 1987 Constitution, Article XIV addresses, in a masterly fashion, issues relating to Education, Science and Technology, Arts, Culture, and Sports.
The Constitution assigns the responsibility of our education system on the State. Section 2 says: “The State shall establish, maintain, and support a complete, adequate, and integrated system of education relevant to the needs of the people and society.”
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The current situation is dire. No public official goes on the record to say that our education system approaches adequacy.
The Vice-President says that she is hopeful that Congress will consider Bills that will make the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) mandatory for students.
This is not a good start. ROTC was abandoned several years ago due to corruption and a wide variety of harassment. I would add that another good reason for not re-introducing ROTC into the school curriculum is that question of efficient time management. In the past, many of those responsible for ROTC took delight in the fact that it was within their range of authority to consume a lot of students’ valuable time in order to implement a poorly constructed ROTC agenda.
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What we need is an education program which will enable students to achieve standards which reflect that our education system is globally competitive. So far, we do not have this.
Many sensible suggestions have been made by a wide range of organizations and individuals. All of these have merit and I hope the Vice President will evaluate then rigorously.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian makes the logical point that in order to focus on ensuring quality education we need to have sufficient training for our teachers. He refers to the implementation of the newly signed Republic Act No 11713, the Excellence in Teacher Education Act.
Well said.
We also need our teachers to be well paid. Low salaries lead to low morale which, in turn, leads to poor quality education.
I believe that former President Duterte balked at increasing teachers’ salaries because there are 800,000 teachers in the country. It was easier to increase police officers’ pay since there are ‘only’ around 200,000 policemen.
There will be vigorous debates in the next few weeks which will determine the Nation’s 2023 budget.
We need to increase public sector spending on education. In 2019 we spent 3.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product on education.
If we can increase this to 4 percent by next year, I believe that we shall see a commensurate increase in standards which will be compatible with the statements of our Constitution./PN
