K-12 doesn’t seem to make perfect sense to me. It seems like a good idea now, but in practice it will be a disaster. I can't see how K-12 is going to work in practice.
I think the Department of Education has to make an effort to keep its teachers conscientious and loyal workers to the Filipino people. But I’m certain that it’ll take it decades to make this problem solved like a dream. For one, as I observed then, a lot of teachers I know had demonstrated almost unbelievable incompetence in their teaching, despite the eligibility rules.
They would go home early or would be absent for a week, making their students wait for ages. Regrettably, this has become the way of life, especially the general beliefs, of most students and such a practice is unobjectionable to them. So, most of their time is spent doing virtually worthless activities or killing themselves writing down the same thing from the textbook. This stupidity is beyond belief sometimes, though. So, how come the Department of Education says K-12 is to decongest and enhance the basic education curriculum?
Some teachers would ask students to help them to clean out the classrooms or spend the whole afternoon hoeing the vegetable patches or weeding them. They would gossip and gossip instead of getting on with some work. One by one they would narrate the sequence of events which led up to what they had become then or how their love life started. I think this technique made learning fun, imperceptibly, because it was most generous of them to give students good grades, at a guess. They were so lazy and unreliable. Thus, I see what they had been doing then as a sell-out or deceitfulness. They’ve got no conscience at all about making their students do nothing or learn nothing at all.
Some teachers would require students do a class project on something useless.
Schools are meant to guide the young to the best information, the wisdom of the ages as well as the best insights of our best thinkers, but it seems schools have become havens of dishonesty and of corrupting the young minds. I think our politics is partly to blame for this. Most teachers got their job on their mayor’s (or representative’s) recommendation. So, the hirings and firings of teachers have become increasingly politicised. Anyway, I don’t want to upset myself by thinking about what might have been.
The Department of Education should invest in good textbooks fairly, I think, and not in those below the satisfactory standard or were only in print to give way to sleaze. For one, good textbooks and good lectures remain an indispensible method of organising what the society has learned into synthesised pieces which make learning efficient, appealing, and sometimes clarifying.
So they say, given the rapid change and the intricacy of information sources facing citizens of the next century, our students must be capable of making their own meanings even when confronted by complexity, vagueness, and info-glut. But how, when they have got plenty of time before they need to know everything taught at school, as their time is always unconditionally useless as their learning seems like superficial or spurious?
The textbook and the lecture have a firm grip on many classrooms. But it seems that no school has started to turn its attention to first-rate textbooks and it’s unprepared to provide classrooms with admirable teachers. I think best textbooks are those made overseas, or by university presses. How can we hold a textbook with a lot of typographical errors in the highest regard? Giving students pedestrian textbooks is a crime, I think. It is greediness. Government officials who have done this have no perceptible vision for this country, but to subsist or make use of their positions to take advantage of the poor Filipino students. Oh, what a shame. I found them rather shallow and depraved.
When I saw the textbooks used by Filipino students, I was disappointed to notice that these textbooks do not compact and synthesise immense bodies of knowledge, simplify and condense the story, organise and translate complex disciplines, and provide teachers and students with a clear path. They do not take students on a quick tour of subject matter which, by all accounts, could easily occupy a lifetime. And most of these textbooks are so out-of-date by this time. Filipino students should be aware that any economy in the world now is becoming increasingly knowledge-based, creating new jobs based on the raw material of ideas and technical innovation.
Observably, most teachers don’t transform the events into terms which arouse the interest of 9 year-olds or 15 year-olds. Something cold and old could become hot and lively if these teachers breathed life into the material. But, sad to say, most teachers in the Philippines don’t bring artistry and fireworks to the classroom. They can’t light fires.
Most of them don’t do a great deal of extra reading and research into the topic before their students, either. They don’t synthesise, summarise and report the best parts. They are not able to translate what might otherwise seem foreign, confusing, monotonous, or overly nonfigurative into a half hour of explanation and illumination.
They can’t build bridges which take their students to the other side.
So, isn’t it that K-12 would just make parents and students struggle under their heavy burden? How about if this will achieve absolutely nothing, and it’ll just be a complete waste of time? For one I'm having doubts about the ability of the Department of Education to do its job. The Department of Education should rather maximise the existing levels of elementary and high school education as I think the majority of what is learned at school these days is not meaningful. Thus, students will retain some of the knowledge for a short while to pass the numerous quizzes and tests they will be faced with that relate to the books but it will be discarded afterwards. Our schools fail to teach anything of pragmatic value and usually just pertain to the programme. This is not about K-12, right? For me, this is about quality education which leads to an excellent student education, this is about creating a foundation of teaching methods that works, and this is about not leaving any child not understanding what was taught.
For me, quality, and not quantity, is at the heart of education and what takes place in classrooms and other learning environments is basically essential to the future well-being of children, young people, and adults. A quality education is one that satisfies basic learning needs and deepens the lives of learners and their overall experience of living. Thus, the Department of Education should access and make available to all, the latest approaches and strategies to make teaching and learning effective, helping transform individuals to become sustainable.
The Department of Education will prove ineffective in delivering K-12, if it won’t fix the Philippines educational system first. Our problem is not about adding two more years. Our problem is not about the Philippines being the only remaining country in Asia with a 10-year basic education programme. It is about a growing need for world-class education. It is more about the pragmatic approach to problems than about an idealistic one. It is teaching and learning in some depth.
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