THE ELECTION season is upon us and candidates are using their considerable rhetorical skills to seek our vote. One area of potential debate is education, but this topic is not prominent. Perhaps fatigue has accompanied the passing of the “enhanced” Education Act in 2013.
This is regrettable since most voters are part of a family in which there are students. Our education system is under scruting. Candidates can gain votes by articulate proposals as to what we need. I do not hear unqualified approval of the consequences of K-12.
One commonly heard complaint is the bossiness of the new Education Act. Specifically, there is no support for the compulsory attendance of 13 years of schooling before a student can attend tertiary education. There is nowhere else in the world where this is the case.
I recall in 2011, Sen. Ralph Recto proposed an enhanced education system. As someone who needs votes in order to keep his job, he listened. The results of his inquiries caused him to recognize that more than four years of high school would not be acceptable to many. His response, therefore, was to propose more progress in the early days of a student’s career. This proposal did not receive the serious consideration it deserved. Instead we were bombarded with K-12 propaganda, much of which was highly debatable.
As a result of the propaganda, there was insufficient examination of the curricular interactions between high school and tertiary education. Former Commissioner on Higher Educations (CHEd), Dr. Patricia Licuanan did not sufficiently join in the important debate on the impact of an additional two years of high school. As a result of not ‘rocking the boat’ we assume she was given a four year contract in 2014, thereby extending her CHEd tenure well into president Duterte’s term. A less acquiescent CHEd head could have done more to ensure a smoother introduction to tertiary education. Also, incoming president Duterte should have been able to appoint Licuanan’s successor from July 1, 2016.
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Many Republic Acts passed by Congress give considerable leeway to the Executive Branch to influence the consequences of new legislation. This leeway, embodied under the description, ‘implementing rules and regulation’ (IRR), should have been applied to the Education Act passed in 2013. Specifically, the bossiness explicit in the Act could have been avoided. Many students are capable of benefitting from many tertiary education courses after four years (not six) of high school. The decision to accept students with four year high school experience should have been remained with the tertiary sector.
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There are more serious problems with our education system which have not been addressed properly.
The first is the number of students who do not complete grade school. One of the United Nations’ millennium development goals to which the Philippines was a signatory, was to ensure that all students completed grade school. We seem chronically unable to meet this goal.
The second area is the inferior progress made by Filipino students in the key subjects of Math, Science, and English. The United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conducts, annually, a comparative study as to how 15 years old students are doing. I believe the Philippines currently does not contribute to this study. In past years, we were significantly inferior to most other countries but did not respond the challenge. We should have done.
We should accept the fact that our students do not make the progress that is made by their peers elsewhere.
Furthermore we should see this as a problem which we should address and overcome.
We need globally competitive quality education which is currently sadly lacking.
We do not need an additional two years of high school.
We need quality./PN
