K-12

The government will implement this June its plan to increase the number of years a student will spend in school from the present 10 years to 12 years by adding two more years at the pre-college years. This is the K-12.

The proponents cite other countries in Asia and elsewhere where the number of pre-college years is 12 and that the Philippines is among the few that still retained the 10-year program.

There is this penchant to copy other countries without considering local conditions. Nobody wants that the Philippines will be left behind but as it stands we are one of the literate countries in this planet and our graduates fare well abroad despite the number of years in formal schooling.

The number of years in formal school is not a guarantee that thing will change for the best that we cannot attain with strong and sustained financial support. In most of the countries proponents cite the government takes most if not all the financial burden of education and thus to increase the number of years is not a great burden to parents compared to the reality in the Philippines. It is not how long but how well one is trained that matters.

Our large number of drop-outs is dictated by the inability of the parents to shoulder the cost of education. While it is touted that public school is free the fact is that they are poorly provided for with facilities and materials and many times the parents are asked to help. Many schools resort of fund raising activities to make both ends meet.

While most barangays have schools these are mainly grade schools and smaller communities can afford only a primary school forcing students to walk for as far as five kilometers each day to attend classes. The problem in these small schools is that their teachers have also to travel far distances to school so that they arrive Monday afternoon and had to leave after lunch on Friday. 

I once visited a barangay high school where the classroom was a makeshift one with both sides open, the students sat on stools and the blackboard was lawanit board. Only the teacher had a dog-eared textbook she used to dictate the lesson.

Repeat this many times in this country and while teachers had to buy their chalks, the government is going to spend several billions more to add another two years of schooling.

Despite these our students do the best they can especially when they go to college where they also beat students who had seven years of grade and five years of high school. This is not to disparage the University St. La Salle, but despite their longer pre-college and pre-high school programs have not shown concretely that their graduates are far better than the others.

My point is that it is not the length of schooling that counts but the intensity of the study, the inclination and determination of the students and availability facilities that lead to better education.

We decry the quality of graduates and yet are the professors not of higher education? During our time a Bachelor’s degree was sufficient for high school and college teaching but today they must have a master’s degree and pass a licensure examination. Are the teachers today with their master’s and doctoral degrees less competent than the earlier ones considering the quality of graduates? By all expectations they should be more competent because they have longer years in school, but why are we complaining?

The students today are over-burdened. When I was in grade school, I had one notebook that was good for two years and we had books only in school but our teacher drilled on the lessons and we had to make do with the little we had.

Now a grade school student had over ten kilos of books, notebooks, workbooks, exercise books and all sorts of learning tools but why do we complain that they are deficient? I suspect that these heavy loads are the reason many textbook publishing companies are rich and teachers and schools require them because the publishers give quite a commission and make generous donations.

Our education officials tend to imitate what they learned from foreign sources. K-12 will require more billions – why not fund and improve what we have? That promise that by second year high a student under K-12 can already work is a lot of bull. If college graduates cannot be hired how much more a teenager? It is not that our graduates are incompetent – there simply are few jobs.

The government should revise the overcrowded curricula and concentrate on the basics to prepare the students when they are on their own. Education goes beyond the classroom and equipped with the tools our graduates can do better. The facts prove this despite our budgetary and time limitations.*

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