Higher education
Since Grade 12 graduates will be prepared to immediately enter the world of work, why would they want to go to college?
The answer depends on an issue facing not just Filipino educators, but all educators in the world.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education last Jan. 24, Jeff Selingo wrote an essay entitled “Higher Ed’s Biggest Problem: What’s It For?” He zeroed in on a problem that UNESCO tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to solve back in 1998, namely, “the lack of consensus about what the higher-education system should be producing.”
If you remember, in 1998, the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education adopted the “World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century: Vision and Action.”
The Declaration had this definition of higher education: “Higher education includes all types of studies, training or training for research at the post-secondary level, provided by universities or other educational establishments that are approved as institutions of higher education by the competent State authorities.” This circular definition simply says that higher education is what higher education institutions do. As you might remember from your college logic class, a circular definition is meaningless.
Selingo pointed to the denial mode afflicting higher educators. He wrote, “Despite all the talk about how today’s traditional student is yesterday’s nontraditional student, we still have a financial-aid and regulatory system built on a one-size-fits-all model, with 15-week semesters and credit based on time spent in a classroom seat. As a result, it is difficult for institutions to consider new ways of serving the diverse needs of today’s students.”
Educators are trying their best to move out of the one-size-fits-all model. The Trends in Higher Education conference of the American National Federation of Advanced Information Services last April 26 in Philadelphia, for example, focused on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), open textbooks, and e-textbooks.
The April 2 discussion in Forbes by Erin Krampetz and Marina Kim had Krampetz articulating what many educators instinctively realize and fear, “The university has traditionally been known as a ‘knowledge center,’ where books and libraries were located. But now knowledge is ubiquitous. You go to Google for knowledge.”
In the current educational reform in the Philippines, the question has been partly answered by the new General Education Curriculum (GEC) of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).
CHED’s Technical Panel for General Education (TPGE) has conducted several public consultations on the new GEC. In those consultations, TPGE chair Maris Diokno and the other TPGE members obtained a consensus from Philippine Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that college education should not repeat basic education but should do something more.
CHED will soon release the new GEC. The details will have to wait until that official release. What is clear at this point, however, is the general philosophy behind the new curriculum. Allow me to quote a statement made during the consultations: “The new GEC will build on knowledge and skills acquired in an expanded 12-year basic education cycle. The program assumes that high school graduates applying for admission into an HEI will have the linguistic, scientific, mathematical, and creative knowledge and skills necessary for higher-level academic work.”
To be sure that students will be ready for higher education, CHED approved College Readiness Standards (CRS) on Oct. 28, 2011. These CRS were used by DepEd as the academic targets of the new K to 12 curriculum.
The K to 12 curriculum has rendered the old or existing GEC irrelevant. The old GEC assumed that entering college students did not have the necessary skills (or the CRS) to do college work. That is why colleges taught remedial courses in languages, math, science, and so on.
It was, however, not only the local educational reform that made revising the GEC necessary. As the TPGE observed, we are “no longer in a multiple-choice world. We need big-picture thinking. There has been an explosion of knowledge. There is a new globalized, technology-driven order. Problems today as more complex and widespread.”
Like most other countries in the world, the Philippines is rapidly changing its views on higher education. External pressures (such as the Bologna Process, the Washington Accord, ASEAN 2015, and APEC) have made us realize that higher education must be drastically reengineered in the face of a rapidly changing world.
Internal pressures (such as the poverty rate, the unemployment rate, the rise of business outsourcing, and the need for inclusive growth) have made HEIs more aware of their primary mission, cited by UNESCO in 1998, namely, “to contribute to the sustainable development and improvement of society as a whole.” That role, said UNESCO, has to be seen in the context of higher education’s duty to act as “a kind of intellectual authority that society needs to help it to reflect, understand and act.”
In short, HEIs form the brain of the nation. Some (not necessarily all) Filipinos must go to college in order that there will be people able to think for the country.
CHED has been working not only to do a new GEC, but to revisit all of the degree courses now being offered by our HEIs. The K to 12 reform is, therefore, not only about basic education. It involves reforming the entire educational system. It involves, in UNESCO’s terms, improving society as a whole.