Educating for life

Education, like life itself, starts at birth and ends with death. The division among elementary, secondary, and tertiary education is convenient for government planners and curriculum designers, but it is not based on human nature. There is no major difference in the learning abilities of children in Grade 6 and those in First Year High School; if we use the new nomenclature, Grade 7, the difference is even more clearly not there, because in private schools Grade 7 is still in elementary school.

The term “lifelong learning” is appropriate, because people really start learning while they are infants and never stop until they are old and grey. At The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (IAHP) in Philadelphia, new-born babies are taught how to read and it is not unusual for two-year-olds to be already reading books. (The IAHP principles are championed in the Philippines by Diliman Preparatory School’s Nikki Coseteng.) As for the other end of life, that the elderly can learn to do something they have never done before is proven by first books written by people in their eighties.

Because basic education forms only part of what should be a seamless education cycle, it is wrong to restrict the planning of the K+12 curriculum to DepEd. This is the reason the government has wisely made the three heads of education agencies (Armin Luistro of DepEd, Patricia Licuanan of CHED, and Joel Villanueva of TESDA) co-equal chairs of what is known as the Steering Committee for K+12, a huge body that consists not only of government agencies but of private organizations and individuals.

Both CHED and TESDA are very much involved in DepEd’s curriculum planning. For bureaucratic purposes, of course, DepEd will implement K+12, with CHED supervising the training of K+12 teachers and TESDA providing the technical-vocational expertise for the non-academic portions of the curriculum. But planning K+12 involves changing not just the current Basic Education Curriculum (BEC), but the General Education Curriculum (GEC) of the tertiary level, as well as the curriculums of undergraduate and graduate major programs.

Let us take Calculus as a simple example. Everywhere else in the world, Calculus is a high school subject. In the Philippines, the GEC requires students to take Algebra. Once Calculus is included in the BEC, the Algebra subject will be unnecessary. In fact, since DepEd is thinking seriously of including Statistics and Financial Literacy as subjects in the BEC, the mathematics requirements at the tertiary level have to be completely rethought.

What CHED’s Technical Panel for General Education (TPGE) recommended last year as the one and only required Mathematics subject in college is “Applied Mathematics.” This course (as well as other courses in the GEC) is envisioned to be “multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, with emphasis on developing the critical and creative capabilities of students.” This course will be required of all college students, whether they are going to major in engineering, philosophy, literature, or even mathematics itself.

It would not make sense to teach the derivation using calculus of, say, the volume of a pyramid to a mixed class consisting of history majors, political science majors, fine arts majors, engineering majors, and math majors. While everyone would have had Calculus in high school (after K+12 is fully implemented), the derivation of the formula would completely turn off the political science major and, on the other hand, would be merely a boring exercise for the math major.

What a GEC subject should do is to explain why majors of any kind need to know the volume of a pyramid. The history majors need to know why the Egyptians used the pyramid form rather than, say, the spherical form to honor their pharaohs. The political science majors need to know why our society has a pyramid structure. The fine arts majors need to be able to use the pyramid in their paintings and sculptures. The engineering majors need to know why pyramids are better or worse than columns in holding up bridges. The math majors need to know that the tedious process of deriving the formula is something they have to learn in their math classes, but the significance of the volume of the pyramid to innumerate mortals is something they have to appreciate.

In other words, the idea of a GEC subject is not specialized or professional training in a particular discipline (such as math), but education in the classical sense, namely, educating a person rather than propagating a discipline or learning area. The GEC is merely part of the fabric of tertiary education. As the CHED TPGE puts it, the first objective of the GEC is “an appreciation of the human condition.” Why do people behave the way they do? Why did the Egyptians work with pyramids? Why do we allow the country to have a pyramid economic and social structure? Why are people not used to seeing pyramids hold up bridges? Why are most Filipinos innumerate? Questions of this kind should lead students towards a better understanding of why we are the way we are.

TEACHING TIP OF THE WEEK. From the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia comes this advice for veteran teachers: Compile a Teaching Portfolio, which “is essentially a factual description of individual teaching strengths and accomplishments supported by relevant data and analyzed personally to show the thinking process behind the artifacts.”