The HESS strand

Students in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HESS) Strand of the Academic Track in Senior High School (SHS) will take the following specialization subjects:

Creative Writing

Creative Nonfiction: The Literary Essay

World Religions and Belief Systems

Trends, Networks, and Critical Thinking in the 21st Century

Philippine Politics and Governance

Community Engagement, Social Participation, and Citizenship

Disciplines and Ideas in the Social Sciences

Disciplines and Ideas in the Applied Social Sciences

Work Immersion / Research / Career Advocacy / Culminating Activity.

The general idea of the specialization subjects in the HESS Strand is to ensure that the student will have a broad background of the field before s/he takes the college subjects in his or her chosen discipline.

Take, for example, a student interested in being a literature teacher. Because literature is now a separate required subject in SHS, there will be a demand for teachers with a degree in education, major in literature. Of course, there are A.B. Literature (even M.A. Literature and Ph.D. Literature) majors already teaching full-time in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). They are, by law, going to have first crack at the SHS jobs, if they wish to move to basic education. These current college teachers are not enough, however, to teach the more than a million students going into SHS every year. A high school student with a consuming interest in literature can fulfill the urge to write and read, as well as the need to earn a living, by taking the HESS Strand.

The student will take up the first two specialization courses, which immediately address the need to get inside literature. Although creative writing is now part of the K to 12 curriculum starting Kindergarten, focusing on it in two SHS subjects is needed in order to ensure that the student will know literary texts from the inside, so to speak. S/he will know how difficult it is to write poetry, fiction, and drama, because s/he will be forced to deal with the issues that all writers face. Writing is as much a technology as engineering, except that writers deal with the invisible, while engineers work with the visible.

The subjects on belief systems and new networks are meant to familiarize the student with the range of human experience, from the ancient religions to the newest technological advances.

The subject on governance is the subject in the current General Education Curriculum (GEC) with the same title. The citizenship subject is a logical continuation of the governance subject.

Why teach the social sciences to future literature teachers? Simply because literature deals with human experience, and the social sciences deal with the same human experience but in more systematic and scientific ways. Literature is a lot more intuitive, despite the rules that govern all writing. The discipline of using the scientific method is important for a future literature teacher, in order that s/he will not mislead her or his students into thinking that anyone can interpret any work any which way.

Why would anyone take the humanities or the social sciences in this day and age, when technology seems to be the flavor of the century? For the simple reason that technology is a product of the humanities and the social sciences.

Who thought of computers long before scientists discovered quantum mechanics and relativity? Who first imagined people walking around with gadgets with which they could communicate with other people, find out how to get to a destination, or name the causes of some illness that affects them? Who even dared dream of space vehicles, or airplanes for that matter?

Who wrote about the hidden urges of a human being before advertisers knew which buttons to push? Who trudged around the habitats of indigenous peoples to find out what makes all human beings tick? Who originally imagined the kind of political leadership that now exists in various countries around the world?

The answer, of course, is literary writers and social scientists. They were the first to dream dreams, the first to point out what human beings really are, the first to write and disseminate religious texts that, even now, motivate billions of people to do what they want or need to do.

In short, HESS students have the chance to predict the future, because they will be among the rare human beings that will spend time looking at the past and learning from all the mistakes and successes of humanity since the beginning of time.

It is not true that HESS will prepare students only for life as writers and scholars. In practical terms, HESS students are in demand for jobs as simple as taking minutes of corporate meetings (believe it or not, secretaries in Makati are actually imported by some businesses in the provinces just to take down minutes of board meetings) and as complex as leading entire countries (Mao Zedong and Ninoy Aquino were poets, need I say more?)

One more thing that should be mentioned: HESS graduates do not even need to be employed to be employed. Writers will write and scholars will research. It is in their blood. If they want to have a high school diploma and eventually even a college diploma to give them academic credentials, there is the HESS Strand of the Academic Track waiting for them.

(To be continued)