The announcement by Education Secretary Armin Luistro that the Department of Education is ready with a draft curriculum to implement the proposal to increase basic education to 12 years is alarming, to say the least.
Luistro has barely warmed his seat, and now he is ready with the "answer" to the problem of quality of education that has hounded this country for decades? If Luistro needs to show that he is doing something, let it not be something that comes at the expense of common sense.
Adding two more years to basic education may help in addressing the problem of quality of education. But that is not the first step to take in an answer that requires many steps. That first step should be to develop a pool of highly qualified teachers to take on the daunting task.
Luistro can add not just two years but twenty, and he will be an old man before he even gets anywhere near improving quality education unless he improves the quality of teachers first. Addressing the problem of quality of education is not a shoot-from-the-hip proposal.
Before Luistro starts talking about adding two years to basic education, does he know how many students drop out of school before they graduate from elementary or high school? Is he aware that many private schools are losing students to public schools because of rising tuition costs?
Of what use are two more years of basic education if the problems that make it hard as it is for students to finish even the existing 10 years are not addressed first? How can Luistro hope to solve the problem if it is clear he does not even understand the problem at all.
Aside from making the first step of ensuring that the country develops an available base of highly qualified teachers to start making schooling a no-nonsense thing, Luistro must next dismantle the one thing making Filipino graduates less competitive against their neighbors.
The government is making a big fuss about the Philippines being the only country still rooted in a 10-year basic education curriculum. Well, if we are so hot about foreign comparisons, why are we glossing over the fact that we are neglecting English while others try to excel in it?
Instead of having the common sense to embrace English to make us globally competitive, the Philippines embarked on the mass idiotization of the Filipino by making Tagalog the medium of instruction in schools.
Is Luistro oblivious to the fact that many citizens of other Asian countries, notably South Koreans, have swamped the Philippines just to study English? Is he aware the Philippines is next to India in the new sunshine industry of outsourcing because of our English proficiency?
Adding two more years to basic education will mean nothing if the teachers who are currently in place do not even know where Dumaguete is, or know only the latest about Wowowee and Willie Revillame but do not know that Hacienda Luisita is not the mother of Luistro.
Adding two more years to basic education will be a total waste of time if the Philippines continues to teach in Tagalog, in pursuit of some misguided notion about nationalism, while the rest of the world requires proficiency in English in all its dealings.
Luistro probably thinks the same way as the pseudo nationalists who, for lack of a better example, points to Japan as one country that, well, speaks Japanese. What the pseudo nationalists failed to get is that Japan is Japan and the Philippines is the Philippines.
To explain further, in case they still didn't get it — when the Japanese speak Japanese, the world listens because they are the Japanese. When Filipinos speak Tagalog, the world does not give a damn because we are not the Japanese. Get it?