FROM MASS LEARNING TO MASS PROMOTION
MARECIL M GERMONES
In the past years, I have personally listened to the endless litany of my colleagues about their issues within the classroom, but in the recent years there seems to be a consensus which I hear not only from our school, but also from other educators in the country, this is that every single passing year the mass promotion of learners is proving to be giving the educators worse and worse batches year after year.
During the pandemic, the DepEd’s mantra was “No student Left Behind”, which reflects the goal and ideals of the department to ensure education for the learners even in challenging times, but realistically these provided a lot of challenges and shortcomings in the resources of the educational sector which ultimately made this program synonymous with “mass promotion”. School's experienced a lack of materials, logistics and infrastructure which hindered the delivery of learning in a lot of places. Additionally, the learners who are not willing to learn and the parents who consents in the learner's behavior by answering the materials or paying someone to answer the material for the learner.
As human beings, we are naturally inclined towards avoiding suffering and for a lot of learners, learning is suffering because as per the theories learning only takes place after pain. The sad consensus is that students today avoid this as much as possible and most of them resort to complaining to the administration when there are inconveniences in the learning process. This created a culture of fragiles in the learning system and students who seem to be entitled to be promoted.
The current cries and rants of educators should echo in the ears of the department administrators, as the front liners of education. Lending deaf ears to these cries is tantamount to lending a blind eye to the crisis. Education is a right, but it is never right to mass distribute diplomas at the same time. The department should start a culture of antifragile among the learners, as the the principle says: learning is a painful process.
-oOoTHE AUTHOR IS ADAS -III AT STA CRUZ ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, LUBAO PAMPANGA