BY HERBERT VEGO
THIS corner half-agrees with Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV who said the other day that the K-12 program should be suspended until the government has resolved the current fundamental problems of the country’s education such as lack of classrooms and school materials. The clarion call of the moment is to rebuild the typhoon-wrecked public and private schools. There are still thousands of them.
That’s correct. I “half-agree” because, rather than just be suspended, the K-12 should be discarded. As envisioned by the elitist Department of Education (DepEd) Secretary Armin Luistro, it would require compulsory kindergarten and prolong elementary-to-secondary education from 10 to 12 years on the wrong assumption that “we have been left behind.”
It would also prolong the agony of poor parents and students. Shouldn’t we be prouder that we do it in only 10 years while others do it in 12?
The K-12 program having kicked off, most parents now see added commercialism beneficial to the schools, especially private ones, and textbook publishers, among other beneficiaries.
Look at some of the new modules K-12 has enforced. To name a few: Handicraft Production, Bread and Pastry Production, Caregiving and Electrical Installation and Maintenance.
Why ram them all into high school kids? Does Luisto expect high school graduates to bake cake or baby-sit for a living right after high school graduation?
These are the same modules that the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) separately teaches to short-course vocational trainees, depending on the field sought. In fact, the main reason why TESDA exists is to accommodate students who can’t afford long professional courses.
The extra two years of high school would have been more than enough for a vocational tertiary education, or for the first two years of professional education. Extending the agony of students and their poor parents would not result in better and more college graduates.
As I said in a previous column, records at the DepEd show that, out of every 100 students who enroll in elementary school, only 58 make it to high school. Of these 58, only 33 enroll in college but only 14 finally graduate. Those who drop out do so due to the incapacity of their parents to spend for their tertiary education.
On the other hand, Trillanes is correct in citing the government’s unpreparedness to solve the threatened retrenchment of about 85,000 college professors and employees when the first batch of K-12 students enroll in Grade 11 (the equivalent of fifth year high school) in 2016. Without K-12, they will have graduated by then.
Simply put, with no high school graduates moving into college in the year 2016 – of course with the exception of a few previous years’ graduates who temporarily stopped schooling – instructors and professors of college freshmen would go either unemployed or underemployed for at least two years.
And so, the only sane move for the PNoy government to do is scrap Luistro’s K-12 program, which has not undergone public hearing, before it’s too late.
It’s really not too late to scrap K-12 because this year is only the third year of its implementation; the third year high school students this year would be glad to hit fourth year and finish high school in 2016.
Who cares what President Noynoy Aquino and Education Secretary Armin Luistro say? The prolonged basic education would only result in more dropouts.
There has been no evidence to show that Filipinos who spend only 10 years in basic education do not succeed. If that were so, then Luistro himself would have gone to the farm.
I remember my friend Canuto, who did spend six years in high school long ago. Did that make him a good college student?
No, he did not have to. His parents bought him a plow and carabao to work on the farm. Today, he is one of the richest farmers in our barangay./PN
