K-12 IS IT OF HELP OR CLUMSINESS?
All the successful Filipino professionals, who are considered elites in their respective fields, such as the businessmen, the politicians, the academicians, the artists, the lawyers, etc.are products of the 10-year Basic Education Curriculum. Can the DepEd question the facts in terms of reliability, usefulness and validity of the incumbent government officials who took up their primary and secondary for ten years only? Do they lack the necessary proficiency and effectiveness in line with their bureaucratic offices? If this will be the case, maybe, it is regrettable that everyone in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of the government. Should they step-down from their pedestal and leave their posts due to their disqualified basic education, for they might drag the country in hazardous situation?
Another argument that I want to emphasize is the additional agony that this K-12 may inflict to the pupils in elementary, and students in the secondary for the long period of completion and for the parents which aggravate their financial incapacity due to the additional Grade 11 and 12, especially because 85% of the population belongs to a hand-to-mouth existence.
It is my prayer therefore for the government to reconsider its position and put up an imperative augmentation to the scarcity of budget for hiring new teachers, putting up new classrooms, procuring armchairs, blackboards, books and several teaching facilities to produce schools with an atmosphere-conducive-to-learning and the relevant training in the basic education or maybe, to reset the basic education into applying again in the 3Rs for elementary so as to regain the Reading, Writing and Arithmetic competencies of the pupils which happened to the most effective curriculum for the basic education.
Reduce the myriad subjects to Primary, Intermediate and Secondary Schools and let attaining skills subjects to be included in the different Vocational Course for the Alternative Learning Schools, such as the TESDA, STI, ACLC, ACTEC, EASTWOOD etc. and avoid inclusion of several extra-curricular activities in basic education and even in the college curriculum towards professionalism in the different aspects and various fields of educational academes.
— oOo— The author is Principal III of Sto. Rosario Elementary School, Apalit District