Stealing time
No less than Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte admitted that the promise of producing employable graduates of the K-12 program remains a promise.
And who can be considered employable after learners are churned out and certified as graduates of a program that attempts to squeeze in professional skills in four-year or five-year degree programs in the last two years of the K-12 curriculum?
Rather than preparing graduates for productive employment, the K-12 program produces more confused graduates glaringly deficient in employable skills.
Take the case of the ABM strand. While some schools may have prepared their students to become bookkeepers and even guided them in getting a national certification from TESDA, still the program dwells more on the theoretical aspects of the job rather than on practical skills.
Schools may consider as proof of competency the TESDA-certification as bookkeepers. What about those who wanted to pursue other fields in business, such as economics, finance, and management? Does the K-12 program also prepare them well for a job as economist or finance or management practitioners?
Let’s admit it. Most schools, both public and private, do not hire licensed professionals to teach and train learners in their chosen strand. Most of them cannot afford to hire doctors, lawyers, CPA’s, economists, engineers, architects, chemists, and other professionals to teach professional skills. The result: learners are subjected to an academic torture of having to regurgitate convoluted professional concepts they have difficulty understanding.
Duterte made a commitment to make the program “relevant to produce competent, job-ready, active, and responsible citizens” and “to develop lifelong learners who are imbued with 21st century skills, discipline, and patriotism.”
Enough of these promises. DepEd and the basic education sector must focus on its core mission of teaching the most basic skills in reading, writing, science, and math. The results of the national and international assessments conducted in the past show that we have done an injustice to our learners.
The K-12 program robbed two years of supposedly productive work or employment from our learners. Any revision or enhancement of the curriculum on paper not accompanied by adequate resources to support the learners is still stealing time.
by Atty. Gregorio B. Austral, CPA