Are we ready?

It may have been just the second day of class but we are still getting the hang of it. For some schools, they have chosen to start class next week. But for public schools, the earlier the better. Even so, such schools are not exempted from the K-12 curriculum that the government has made to change the education system in our country. There are a lot who are nervous and excited at the same time. Yet, the most crucial question remains? Are we ready?

By “we” I mean the Philippine nation. It is very obvious where a huge bulk of the country’s budget goes to. If not to paying our international debt, it is being spent for military funds because we need defense; especially now that China has recently been on its toll on claiming an island of ours.

For those of you who are not familiar with K-12 (pronounced as “k” to twelve), it is the big move of the Department of Education to upgrade our education system so that we can be competitive with other countries. It has been found out that it is only us and another developing nation who has not adapted the 12 year scheme for the basic education curriculum. Instead of having only grade 6, there is an additional two more levels commonly known as middle school before reaching high school. They are foreseeing that towards the finish of the pioneering batch, they will be able to take subjects that are related to their course of choice for college.

According to the Department of Education there is an estimated backlog of 66,800 classrooms in public schools and 124,286 toilets for this school year. That is just for infrastructure. There are still more things to spend on such as textbooks and teachers’ compensation, which the government should also be responsible for. The number itself tells you that we are not ready. There is too much to change, too much to handle and this requires more spending. We all know we are low on provisions when it comes to the education sector.

However, there are regions in the country that are ready. With the help of the local government units (LGUs), they are able to manage. I can say with pride that region 7 is very ready especially with the bridge program where in the mother tongue is used in class. The Akademyang Binisaya has doubled their efforts in preparing their materials for this new curriculum. In a phone interview, Mayor Sitoy, who is one of the pillars of Akademyang Binisaya said that nothing beats learning with the language that you are most familiar with. Take learning Ilonggo without any help from a native and you’re bound to learn only the most common expression they have, bala haw.

In one way or another, this program would indeed help a lot when it comes to comprehension. Why do we even have to dwell on a foreign language when explaining Math even if we do not know the language ourselves? The learning is compromised. Some people argue that using the mother tongue would hinder the child in becoming English proficient. Don’t forget that we Filipinos are versatile; we can learn many dialects and languages at a time.

Going back to the question of being ready, I’d have to commend the Department of Education for organizing trainings for the whole summer. We saw teachers from different municipalities flock to the city just to attend such trainings.

Now that we are trying to bring our education system a notch higher, we can only cross our fingers if it would really be effective. We’ll have to see if K-12 would really improve education in our country. But as for now, welcome back students! Or shall I say, maayong pagbalik mga tinun-an!

**Published in the Freeman newspaper on May 5, 2012