K+12 in the Philippines

THE PITFALLS OF K+12

The Aquino administration proposed two-year extension of the 10-year basic education cycle to lift the quality of education. In addition to kindergarten, the new program will set 6 years of elementary education, 4 years of junior high school (grades 7 to 10), and 2 years of senior high school (grades 11-12). The curriculum will also allow specialization in science and technology, music and arts, agriculture and fisheries, sports, business, and entrepreneurship, and others. Students will be graduating around the age of 18, and will be expected to be fully armed to enter the work world without even without a college degree. These all sounds very nice, but if we will get down to the ground, it doesn’t make sense.

Several groups continue to protest against the proposed change. A statement from the Kabataan Partylist said that the K+12 (Kindergarten plus 12) program will only add “more problems” to the current educational system. It will be a great burden on the part of the parents since they that have to shell out more money for the education of their children. The government does not have the money to pay for two more years of free education, since it does not even have the money to fully support today’s ten years. DepEd must first solve the lack of classrooms, furniture and equipment, qualified teachers, and error-free textbooks. We can do in ten years what everyone else in the world takes 12 years to do. Why do we have to follow what the rest of the world is doing? We are better than all of them. Filipinos right now are accepted in prestigious graduate schools in the world, even with only ten years of basic education.

As far as the curriculum is concerned, DepEd should fix the current subjects instead of adding new ones. The problem is the content, not the length, of basic education. As an editorial put it, we need to have better education, not more education. A high school diploma