During his campaign in 2010, Noynoy Aquino promised to take ten steps to upgrade Philippine education. The new K to 12 curriculum fulfils six of the ten points in his education agenda, namely:
• 12-Year Basic Education Cycle
• Universal Pre-Schooling for All
• Technical Vocational Education as an Alternative Stream in Senior High School
• Every Child a Reader by Grade 1
• Science and Math Proficiency, and
•Medium of Instruction Rationalized.
RA 10533 (Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013), which adds Grades 11 and 12 (Senior High School or SHS), fulfils the first promise. RA 10157 (Kindergarten Education Act), which requires all public school students to go through Kindergarten, fulfils the second promise; previously, pre-schooling was available only for some, not all, children. The Technical Education and Skills Development Academy (TESDA) now provides National Certificates (NCs) to students even in Junior High School (JHS), thus more than fulfilling the third promise.
With improved reading strategies in Grade 1, the new curriculum fulfils the fourth promise. The spiralling of science and mathematics education from Kindergarten to Grade 12 ensures that proficiency in these two learning areas will be improved, thus fulfilling the fifth promise.
Section 4 of RA 10533 mandates the use of the Mother Tongue as the primary medium of instruction from Grade 1 (therefore, also Kindergarten) to Grade 6, fulfilling the sixth promise. I shall discuss this provision fully in a future column.
In this column, let me follow the progress of three fictional students (Pedro, Pablo, and Maria) after Grade 10.
Things become very different for the three students when they reach Grade 11. They will still be taking common or “core†subjects, such as Oral Communication in English; Reading and Writing in English; Talastasang Filipino; Pagbasa, Pagsulat, Pananaliksik sa Wika; 21st Century Philippine Literature from the Regions; 21st Century Literatures of the World; Media and Information Literacy; General Mathematics; Statistics and Probability; Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person; Physics and Chemistry; Biology and Earth Science; Personal Development; and Understanding Society and Culture.
All three students may even be taking up electives in a foreign language, such as Arabic, French, German, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Unlike the other two students, however, Pedro (who wants to open his own game development company) will be taking subjects that will help him set up a business, program computers, and do storylines for games. That means that he will spend time preparing to get TESDA NC2s in entrepreneurship and computer programming. In addition, he will take electives in creative writing to help him plan out how characters in his games will behave. He will do all of these in Grade 11 and the first half of Grade 12.
During the afternoons or weekends in Grade 11 and in the first half of Grade 12, he will spend some time working in a game development company. (There are several such companies in the Philippines, some of them doing original games, some of them doing outsourced work for foreign companies.) In the last five months of Grade 12, he will immerse himself completely in that company. He will be doing what used to be known as On-the-Job Training (OJT). Because of various government regulations about OJTs, however, his stint in the company will be known simply as Immersion. In other words, he will sometimes not be on campus during Grade 11 and the first half of Grade 12 and will not be on campus at all during the second half of Grade 12.
Pablo (who wants to become a professional football player) will take subjects that will help him understand the physics and medicine of sports. He will also take some management and education subjects, because he will eventually stop being a professional player and start doing coaching or teaching. Of course, he will spend time during Grade 11 and the first half of Grade 12 in the gym or on the field, working under a coach. Like Pedro, he will not be on campus at all during the second half of Grade 12; instead, he will be training and competing full-time in football.
Unlike Pedro and Pablo, Maria (who wants to become an engineer) will be spending all of SHS on campus. She will taking a lot of specialized subjects to prepare for higher-level work in college, such as General Chemistry, Calculus-based General Physics, General Biology, Pre-Calculus, and Basic Calculus. (She looks forward to spending fewer years in college, because she will already have studied what today are studied only in college.)
If we generalize from the three examples, we can see that there are three TRACKS that students in SHS can choose from: Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL for Pedro), Academic (for Maria), and Sports & Arts (for Pablo).
Each of these tracks offers different STRANDS for students. TVL consists of numerous TESDA courses. Students opting for Sports & Arts may specialize in Music, Dance, Film & Media, Visual Arts, Indigenous Art, Theater Writing, and so on.
The Academic track consists of three strands, namely, HESS (Humanities, Education, Social Sciences), STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, including the Health Sciences), and BAM (Business, Accountancy, Management).
In short, all SHS students, like Pedro, Pablo, and Maria, will start to do what they want to do the rest of their lives. (To be continued)