More on expanded basic education

The latest news is that DepEd is really going headstrong in its 12-year basic education scheme. The name of the game is K-12, which means that a child will spend one year in Kindergarten and another year in a 5-year high school program.

DepEd's top guru, Secretary Armin Luistro, justifies this new initiative by saying that with the additional year in the secondary level basic education graduates will be readily employable. The implication is that the vocational component in the high school will be strengthened such that acquisition of marketable skills will be ensured. Well and good.

The sad reality at present is that only about 40 percent (30 in rural areas) of high school graduates are able to pursue a college course and out of this barely 30 percent obtain a degree. What happens to the millions who are out of school? They join the horde of jobless people. Unproductive, they serve as a drag to progress, instead of agents of economic growth.

Blame it on the curriculum. Designed in the early 1980's under Secretary Onofre Corpuz, this program is biased towards college preparation. There are rudiments of technical training under "Teknolohiya and Edukasyon Pantahanan" (taught in Tagalog like four other subjects) but lack of competent teachers and non-existent equipment has reduced these courses into mere "blackboard" sessions with students getting steeped in the what but not in the how of manual skills.

As defined in its program of study, technology is supposed to cover agriculture, fishery, electronics, construction skills, trade and others. Home Economics is supposed to aim at training in home arts including cooking, sanitation, health, child care, plus embroidery, dressmaking and others. But students finish the program with only scant know-how on these income related courses for you know what reason.

Before Corpuz dismantled the old secondary curriculum there was the so-called 2-2 plan in which two years were spent in general education and the remaining two in technological training (for those who opted for it). Trade schools were the strong proponents of this and their vocational finishers were readily absorbed in business and industry. But the products of the present-day curriculum? They have nothing to show by way of trade skills, and even in academic preparations they are acutely deficient. Academe, academe, the fetish of our former educational leaders have brought a generation of unemployables and a country of diminishing economic adequacy.

What's the lesson behind that initiative? The lesson is that the country's educational program should not swing and sway according to the mere perception of its leaders. Change is good (It's the mania of the current leadership, isn't it?). But change for change's sake is a fruitless and expensive undertaking.

The move to expand the schooling years of our children could be an expensive exercise in futility, to use a cliché. Minus the necessary logistics and competent teachers we would be throwing away our scant resources for nothing. Quality outputs would still be a fading academic gleam like what is presently happening. Despite the tens of billions added to education budget year after year, still the graduates of basic curriculum do not measure up to expectation.

Quality school finishers is of course one of the reasons the DepEd leadership has decided to cash in on the two-year add-on. But any man in the street knows that quality does not equate with length of schooling. If the structure is defective the output is defective too no matter how long the child is kept in school.

To the credit of the K-12 plan, however, a pre-school exposure is really needed by entrants to Grade I. Research has shown that (assuming the requisites of good instruction are available) learning is facilitated if the child starts early, even as early as three years, if possible. That's why in the private sector there's Nursery plus Kinder I and II before the child is admitted to Grade I. Moreover, once institutionalized, Kindergarten schooling would be available to all, children of poor families included, thus equalizing the playing field, so to speak.

But a five-year high school is a doubtful proposition. If employability is the aim, as stated recently by the Secretary, the thing to do is strengthen the vocational-technical aspect of the current curriculum by two-streaming the learning areas and by providing schools with state-of-the-art equipment and assigning highly competent technical trainers.

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