Category: education

HIV alert… the vernacular of sex

448 fresh HIV cases reported for the first month of the year … 118 of the new HIV patients belong to the 15 to 24 age bracket. … 50% or 224 patients are from Metro Manila, 16% from the Calabarzon, 7% from Davao region, 4% from Western Visayas … epic failure of sex education, such as it is.

SEX EDUCATION: Comic Failure of Language
By Godofredo U. Stuart, MD

As language, Filipino is very expressive and illustrative. I often marvel at its descriptive powers, a single word that will need half a dozen or more English words to describe: umaampiyas. Or words that wax poetic: takip-silim, agaw dilim, bukang liwayway. It’s a language that lends to the Pinoys’ penchant and delight for word play, never at a loss in coining words that become mainstream: trapos, epal, promdi. Its vowel-rich words lend to the staccato and cadence of Rap music. But when it comes to the language of sex, the vernacular fails—dreadfully—and looks to English for rescue.

The failure is widespread—in schools, in media, and homes. A failure that is both comic and stupid.  Read on…

Serious Problems with the K-12 Senior High School Curriculum

By Joel Tabora, S.J.

During the DepEd-CEAP Mindanao Summit organized by CEAP’s National Basic Education Commission (NBEC) and co-hosted by Ateneo de Davao University on 17-18 February, the intention was to appreciate progress attained in the implementation of the K-12 educational reform and to understand the requirements of the Anti-Bullying Act of 2013 (RA 10627) for the Mindanao schools.

Read on…

luistro & licuanan, no to september, hurray!

ever since i can remember, there has been this proposal to start the schoolyear in september rather than in june because daw by september the rainy season (july to october) would be almost over and fewer schooldays would be lost due to rains and floods.  but always, ALWAYS, such a proposal would be widely thumbed down because it would mean that the hot hot hot summer months, april and may, would see the students and teachers suffering the heat in crowded and poorly ventilated classrooms, not to speak of the matrapik trip to and from school under the hot sun, out in the streets where everything is hot, the cars and tricycles and buses, the pavements and sidewalks, everything gets so hot, “you could fry an egg on the sidewalk” i’ve heard it said, and it’s easy to believe.  in recent years, the department of health and pagasa have even taken to issuing health advisories, stay indoors, keep cool, drink lots of water, or risk suffering heatstroke and dehydration.

well, this time, last july to be exact, it was no less than senator drilon who renewed the call for a september-june cycle due to the bad weather then prevailing, heavy rains and widespread flooding, and, oh, how he worries for his granchildren, he said.  but what about the summer heat, mr. senator?  ok lang, may aircon naman ang mga kotse ng mga apo ninyo?  at malamang merong electric fans galore, if not aircons, ang well-ventilated classrooms ng sosyal private schools they go to?  pero paano na ang nakararami in the public schools?  sorry na lang sila?

salamat na lang at pumalag si deped sec armin luistro: elementary and high school schedules are keeping to the june-to-march cycle, his paramount concern being the effects of intense summer heat on the health and studies of our young.  here’s hoping he doesn’t change his tune.

even if we were to factor in climate change, granting, for the sake of argument, a “new normal” in rains a la ondoy and supertyphoons a la yolanda (by the way, ondoy came in october, yolanda in november), it’s not as if the summer months aren’t getting hotter and hotter too, and summers are sooooo long, with rarely any reprieve, unlike the wet season’s rains and floods that come and go.  so what if classes have to be suspended, there are ways and ways of making up for that kind of lost time.  besides, it seems to me that there’s more that we can do about the heavier rains and widespread flooding, such as reforestation, clearing our waterways, zero waste management, and the like, samantalang the summer heat we can only beat by doing nothing, or as little as possible, unless happily ensconced in air-conditioned homes and offices.

as for the big universities, UP, UST., ateneo, la salle, that seem to be quite eager to shift to the september-to-june cycle and be in synch with the rest of asean when the ASEAN economic community (AEC) kicks off next year, the better obviously to accommodate foreign students and academics, i share CHED’s misgiving that it would lamentably render these universities out of synch with the rest of the country.  says CHED head patricia licuanan:

“… it is also important to think of what will happen in relation to Filipino students because the basic education will not change. What do you do with these students coming into college—they graduate in March and they will wait until August to enter college?”

“Some compromise might be necessary. One of these might be a quarterly system or a tri-semester to provide more entry points for foreign students coming in and ours going out,” she said.

“This is not for everybody. Schools should assess if they have enough cross border activity to make it worth it to change their academic calendar. What percent of the school population are we talking about?

“Perhaps they should crunch their numbers first,” Licuanan said, adding that flooding and storms will still be a problem in August and September.

She also said CHED is worried about the repercussions of revising the academic cycle, particularly on entrance and licensure exams.

here’s hoping that licuanan doesn’t change her mind either.  i think she and luistro are on the right track, setting the right tone, taking the appropriate attitude toward asean integration: we can be part of the ASEAN economic community without forcing synchronization where it is not advisable because disruptive of, rather than conducive to, the good of the whole.

pinoy education: from bad to worse, k-12 and all

read conrado de quiros’s Making the grade, part of which dwells on the allocation for debt payments being 3 times larger than that for education:

… our schools are getting worse. Only the University of the Philippines remained among the top 100 of 300 schools in Asia. Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University and the University of Santo Tomas, though still in the middle ranges, slipped during the past year. Specifically, UP improved from 68th to 67th while Ateneo fell from 86th to 109th, La Salle from 142th to 151th, and UST from 140th to 150th.

Rep. Luz Ilagan, a former university professor, says this is due to schools preferring quantity to quality. Many universities are really just diploma mills offering popular courses based on public demand. Poor-quality elementary and high school education lead to poor-quality students entering college. Some of them have barely passable comprehension and writing skills.

Rep. Antonio Tinio says it’s funds, or the sore lack of them. “In Asia, public universities rule. In order for our higher education sector to become competitive, the government must drastically step up its funding and other support for our state universities and colleges. Unfortunately, government higher education policy over the last two decades has gone in the other direction, towards budget cuts, contractualization of faculty and commercialization.”

Ric Reyes of the Freedom from Debt Coalition puts the case of lack of funds for public education more forcefully. Last year, the budget for debt payments was P739 billion, three times more than the budget for education, which was only P224.9 billion. The latter was only 2.2 percent of GNP, well below the world benchmark of 6 percent. Unesco notes that the Philippines has the lowest expenditure for education in proportion to total budget. Since 1955, education has dropped from 30.78 percent of the budget to 15 percent post Edsa. This year’s education budget at 14.97 percent is lower than the post Edsa average of 15 percent.

I share their sense of apprehension, if not alarm, at the state, and future, of our education. With some caveats.

Certainly, I agree that we need to revise the budget and give education the utmost, ultimate, first-and-last priority it deserves. Which, not quite incidentally, the Constitution decrees. Debt payments are not the national priority, education is. Which, not quite incidentally as well, shows the continuing horror of martial law: To this day we are still paying for the Marcoses’ debt. Next time Imelda throws a party, know that you and your children are paying for it.

I don’t care if government makes all sorts of excuses to defer payment (“Sorry, but we have mouths to feed and minds to open”), or more conciliatorily negotiates to restructure payments again and again, but education should be three times more than debt payments. Hell, education should have half the budget, if we are going to have half the chance to curb, if not eradicate, poverty….

and read ben kritz’s Expanded program getting off on the wrong foot, mostly about k12 and how it’s meant, not to improve the quality of education, but to prepare students for overseas foreign work.

Rep. Luz Ilagan of Gabriela party-list criticized the government for “only adding quantity, not quality” with the implementation of the K-12 program, in reaction to a recent ranking that placed only five (down from 14 a year ago) Philippine universities among the top 300 universities in Asia. Ilagan’s contention is that the quality of Philippine higher has declined because of the poor preparation of incoming freshmen students and a fixation “on getting many students to graduate from popular courses that markets demand”; not nearly enough attention has been paid to improving the quality of the primary and secondary curriculum, in Ilagan’s view, therefore the K-12 program as it has been presented will have no real positive effect in improving the Philippines’ al reputation.

Ordinarily I regard the viewpoints of acknowledged leftists with a high degree of skepticism, particularly those expressed by the Migrante group, which has the seemingly incompatible objectives of promoting the interests of overseas workers while working towards eventually ending the labor export phenomenon. Over the weekend, however, I attended the annual parents’ orientation meeting at the private school where my three children are enrolled, and I was surprised, to say the least, at the “official” point of view towards the K-12 program. The academic director of our school—which already had a robust academic and extra-curricular program, as well as a good reputation for producing college entrants—in addressing the K-12 program offered the opinion that it “would better prepare students to find work overseas because of its focus on vocational training, and the fact that the students will be 18 [years old] [and thus legally employable] when they graduate high school.”

Knowing how diligently our school’s administration coordinates its management with Department of (DepEd) policy, it would now appear as though the complaints of Migrante’s Martinez and Ilagan have considerable substance. And if, in fact, the enhancement of the Philippines’ human export resource is a priority of the K-12 program, then the fears of many that the extended curriculum was implemented for all the wrong reasons are completely valid.

back in july 2010, then ateneo president fr. bienvenido nebres criticized the aquino admin’s k-12 plans, recommending instead that extra years be added to “select college courses”.  fr. ben was ignored, of course, as the agenda, it would seem, has always been to perpetuate the pretense of “sound economic fundamentals” via OFW remittances.