EDITORIAL - 2 more years of schooling but no homework on weekends?

The Department of Education recently issued Memorandum 392 ordering that no homeworks or assignments should be given to students during weekends. The thinking at the DepEd is that the free weekends should give time for schoolchildren to bond with their parents.

There is nothing wrong with schoolchildren bonding with their parents. But the DepEd memo assumes too much. Worse, it assumes too much erroneously. It is wrong to assume bonding happens only on weekends. Conversely, it is wrong again to assume any bonding happens at all on weekends.

Bonding between schoolchildren and their parents, or between whoever for that matter, cannot be made subject to regulations. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. And the DepEd can issue a thousand memos to that effect and it doesn’t matter a wee bit.

And all the while schoolchildren not only lose the chance to brush up on their learning, more importanly they lose the opportunity to independently assume some degree of responsibility, which only doing homework on their own volition can offer.

And to think this is the very same Department of Education that insists two more years should be added to the basic education curriculum because the present 10 years is insufficient to fully prepare the young.

This “no-homework-on-weekends-so-children-can-do-something-else” memo is the biggest and most glaring proof that the 12-year basic education curriculum being aggressively pushed by the Department of Education has absolutely no basis in fact.

For how can the Deped say schooling is too short on one hand, and then say don’t do anything remotely related to schooling on weekends on the other? Hello? Does the DepEd even know where it is going?

But then again, the present leadership of the DepEd merely reflects the general feeling of being lost and directionless being exhibited by the national leadership. Everything seems to proceed by trial and error, on a hit-or-miss basis.