THIS writer, while attending the graduation exercises for the first batch of high school graduates at Central Philippine University (CPU) under the “K-12” program of the Department of Education (DepEd), asked some of them how it felt.
They all answered “happy,” but also lamented that they could have gone through their second year in college already without the K-12 that mandates compulsory kindergarten and two more years of high school. Including six years of elementary school, that means 13 straight years of preparation for college.
In his speech before the high school graduates, however, CPU President Teodoro Robles stressed a different matter – that CPU’s high school department would not have thrived had K-12 not been introduced. He ran short of saying that four years was no longer enough to sustain the high school’s profitability.
That made me wonder whether Armin Luistro – the DepEd secretary during President Noynoy Aquino’ time – was thinking of a similar situation at De La Salle College, where he had been president, when he conceptualized in 2012 the K-12 program on the pretext that “we have been left behind by other countries”; and that high school graduates would have the option of getting employed without proceeding to college.
Well, Luistro has been well rewarded. Once out of DepEd employment, he got back his old job as president of De La Salle.
As early as 2013, this corner was begging of the PNoy government to abort K-12 program because there was no need to “globalize,” unless we wanted more professionals to work abroad and leave family behind.
Prolonged basic education, I thought, would only prolong the agony of poor parents and students. Shouldn’t we be prouder that what we do in only 10 years what others do in 12 years?
Now I know I was and am right. Already, no less than Alberto Fenix, the president of Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI), has expressed worry that the first batch of K-12 graduates would not be employable in a professional workplace. He said on a recent TV interview that the minimum requirement of 80 hours or 2 weeks for the students’ on-the-job training was not enough to prepare them for skilled jobs.
On the same TV show, a completer of the “technological-vocational-livelihood” track shook his head, stressing he would have preferred four years of high school and two years of better skills training at the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA)
He argued that since most subjects in senior high school are the same ones taught in first year of college, there is no need to spend time and money for grades 11 and 12.
Why ram the unnecessary subjects into all junior-high students (grades 7 to 10) – such as Handicraft Production, Bread and Pastry Production, Caregiving and Electrical Installation and Maintenance – when very few would benefit from them?
Grades 11 and 12 have college-level subjects like Philosophy, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Calculus. An additional Filipino, studied since the elementary grades, is included.
In the 1950s to ‘60s, the government lent us books for free. Each student in each subject got a book, to be returned at the end of the school year for lending to the next batch of the next year. Extending the agony of students and their poor parents would not result in better and more college graduates.
K-12, to sum it up, complicates an existing problem revealed by DepEd itself: that out of every 100 students entering elementary school, only 58 make it to high school. Of these 58, only 33 enroll in college but only 14 finally graduate, mainly due to financial problems. (hvego31@yahoo.com/PN)
