'K+12' will produce employable grads

It’s human nature to resist change, like the “K+12” basic education course. But the shrillest line against adding three more years to the present ten of elementary and high school is also the silliest. Starting kids off one year earlier and releasing them two years later than usual, so they say, would only waste time and burden parents. Instead of high schoolers finding work at once and thence feed their olds, the latter would need to sustain them for extra time in school detention. The flawed surmise is that parents must rear offspring to beget slave labor. Also, that graduates of the deficient ten-year program readily land jobs. They don’t. A quick scan of help-wanted ads shows employers requiring at least 2nd-Year college for lowly clerks. That’s because 15-year-old products of the current system are unripe for employment and under-trained in fundamentals. Parents learn the painful truth too late. Expecting education to convert children quick from freeloaders to benefactors, they end up having to support them far longer.

The better assumption is that the longer a child stays in school, the more basic skills he learns and masters. That is now nearly unanimously accepted. The Philippines is the only country in Asia, and one of three in the world, that clings to the 10-year combination of elementary and high school. All the rest have shifted to at least 12. To resist following suit, in unfounded, conceited belief that Filipinos are smartest anyway, is to ignore methodical studies on child development. Such scientific inputs led to the Washington Accord, prescribing 12 years’ basic schooling for entry to vocational practice or engineering school. Also to the Bologna Accord, which requires 12 years of basic education for university admission or practice of trade in Europe. Filipinos are being left behind in training, so becoming uncompetitive by world standards. That explains why Philippine-licensed professionals land only lower positions, even in the Middle East.

Obviously the present system isn’t working. It churns out under-skilled, thus unemployable graduates. A World Bank report on Philippine skills in 2009 lists the most common complaints of employers: graduates lack critical skills, such as problem solving, initiative, and creativity. The resulting statistics are stark. Unemployment remains high, 7.4 percent last year, due to skills-jobs mismatch. Four of every five jobless, 80.6 percent, are aged 15-34. Yet seven of every ten of them, 70.9 percent, are at least high school grads.

K+12, not a math equation, is broken down to K>6>4>2. Instead of taking 6-year-olds into Grade 1, the Department of Education would make 5-year-olds go first to kindergarten. That’s to initiate them early to letters, numbers, colors, shapes, sounds, and dexterity. Then, onto enhanced six years of elementary and four years of junior high school, for calibrated honing in competencies. Two years of senior high school would be put in last. Depending on teenagers’ emerging inclinations, they would sit in entrepreneurial or vocational or college preparatory. All this for free, in public schools.

If K+12 seems familiar to can-afford families, it’s because that’s what they pay for in private school, with slight variations. They put kids to nursery school as early as ages 3 and 4, then kinder at 5, elementary Grades 1-7, and 1st-4th Year high — all for college grounding. No wonder most rich kids are better at Math, Science, Reading and Writing. The can-affords has known it for years. A minimum 12-year basic education program had been planned as far back as 1925, but instead of applying it the government even abolished Grade 7. Coupled with the elitist political economy, this accounts for the wide gap between rich and poor. Only now, nine studies later, the latest in 2008, will the 12-year program be offered in public schools. K+12 will enable the unprivileged catch up.

Critics of K+12 say the DepEd should focus instead on easing the shortage of classrooms and instruction materials, and sharpening the skills of teachers. Actually that’s part of the plan. But it shouldn’t mean another excuse to postpone K+12. Implementation will be phased. Universal kindergarten will be offered starting school year 2011-2012. By SY 2012-2013 the new curriculum will be introduced to incoming Grade 1 and 1st-Year junior high students. Senior high will begin in SY 2016-2017.

The DepEd will rush to ease age-old shortages of schools and books, and upgrade teacher skills to arrest the instructional decline. Worsening are the sad comparative results in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. In 2003 TIMSS tests the Philippines came out 34th out of 38 countries in 2nd-Year high school Math, and 43rd out of 46 countries in Science. That same year for Grade 4 the Philippines was 23rd out of 25 countries in both Math and Science. In 2008 only science high schools participated in the Advanced Math category. You’d think that Filipinos, supposedly the smartest of all, would have it. Nope, they landed last of ten countries.

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”When you love what you do, time is so short. When you hate, any time is too long.” Shafts of Light, Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ

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