Scapegoats

OUReducation manag ers are orchestrating a sinister shift in the direction and operations of tertiary education in this country.

Part and parcel in the implementation of the K to 12 program in basic and secondary education is also the impending rationalization of not just State Colleges and Universities but also private institutions of higher learning all over the country as outlined in the Commission on Higher Education ( Ched) memo number 20 dated 28th of June 2013.

Come 2016, there will be no freshmen students enrolling for college because all of them will be taking the mandatory additional two years of senior high school under the K to 12 program.

It is expected that the first batch of graduates from high school under this new scheme will have already taken the core General Education ( GE) courses in their senior high school years by the time they enter college.

That is if they are lucky to be given the chance to proceed to college since it is expected that many if not most students will naturally fall under the vocational track and made ready for employment. The lucky few will enter college proceeding directly to a reduced GE curriculum of twenty-four units of what used to be forty-five units minimum. The four- year college course is now to be completed in three years or less.

Carrying the brunt of these radical changes in the educational system are not just the students and the programming of their lifechances through the K to 12 but also thousands of faculty members in fields that cater to what is now still known as the GE program. Each institution of higher learning has academic programs providing for these service courses that students at the tertiary level undergo. A curriculum usually has fifteen units each from the Arts, Math and Sciences, and the Social Sciences.

In the new scheme, faculty members currently teaching these courses are exhorted to adapt the new prescribed GE courses that Ched has identified that combine and compress the old GE subjects into new formulations with a reduced total number of units. They are then encouraged to develop nine units of marketable new courses on top of the twenty four units prescribed by Ched following the Revitalized GE Program modeled after UP.

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