The SHS curriculum

To understand the curriculum for Senior High School (SHS) or Grades 11 and 12 (available on the DepEd website), we have to remember the main reason we added the two grades in the first place.

Although there were other reasons for extending basic education (our short cycle being unacceptable to countries where Filipinos now live and work, the increased amount of information and skills that needs more years to learn, and so on), the primary beneficiary of SHS are the 20% of students who finish Fourth Year High School (now labeled Grade 10) but do not continue to college.

The statistics, which improve only slightly every year, are well-known. For every 100 Filipino children that enter Grade 1 in public schools, only 66 finish Grade 6, only 58 continue to high school, only 43 graduate from high school, and only 23 enroll in college. Only 14 eventually graduate from college.

Ten of the 20 high school graduates that fail to enter college pay their way through technical or vocational courses, leaving 10 as out-of-school youth (OSY) that join the rest of the push-outs. (We do not call them “drop- outs” anymore, because it is the fault of the system, rather than their own fault, that they leave school.) All in all, there are at least six million OSY right now, most of whom are a burden to society, if not a threat.

To give these 10 OSY a chance for a fruitful and better life, we added two years of free public education. (Students in private high schools usually continue to college and do not, therefore, have the same problem. This is the main reason private schools were allowed by the Department of Education to “calibrate” or adjust the labeling of their grades. Many private schools already had 12 if not more years of pre-university education prior to 2010.)

The added two years, comprising SHS, therefore, have to answer the need for these push-outs to gain employment, as well as to enter college if their circumstances improve.

The new curriculum (not just of SHS, but of the entire K to 12 cycle) is best explained through a diagram.

The desired outcome of the entire K to 12 curriculum is a “holistically developed Filipino with 21st century skills.”

You can see immediately that an objection raised against the curriculum, particularly its insistence on Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education, is misguided. Some private schools insist that they have foreign students whose Mother Tongue is not any of the native languages of the Philippines. In the first place, the curriculum is meant for Filipinos, not foreigners. In the second place, private schools are not envisioned in the curriculum. After all, if private schools had exactly the same curriculum as public schools, why would parents choose private education?

The modifier “holistically developed” is defined by four indicators: Information, Media, and Technology Skills; Learning and Innovation Skills; Communication Skills; and Life and Career Skills. These indicators are, more or less, self-explanatory, so we will not spend time on them right now.

Instead, let us look at the four “curriculum exits” as envisioned by the Steering Committee of the K to 12 reform. (Remember that DepEd is only one of several government and non- government bodies that crafted the curriculum. CHED, TESDA, PBED, COCOPEA, NCCA, and several other organizations and agencies worked together for two years on the curriculum, with the help of some foreign funding agencies.)

A graduate of the K to 12 program (since Kindergarten in public schools started only in 2012, the first students that will go through the full curriculum will graduate only in 2024) shall be ready to go to college, to be employed, to become an entrepreneur, and (not or) to use middle level skills.

We might be the only country in the world that promises all four exits or outcomes at the end of Grade 12. Most other countries stream their students into two tracks, one of which is academic, the other vocational (or as we call it, Tech-Voc).

When the government asked parents whether they wanted streaming, however, the parents vigorously objected. As a result, our K to 12 curriculum promises something other countries do not bother to promise, namely, that every graduate will be ready for college, whether they have the academic aptitude or not. (You can see that my personal opinion is that this is too much to expect of six million children, but that is just me.)

What the K to 12 curriculum, particularly the SHS curriculum, otherwise promises is realistic: at the end of basic education, every Filipino should be able to make a living.