It’s not about homework

REPUBLIC Act 10533 was signed into law on May 15, 2013 by President Aquino.

It is described, with an inappropriate air of self-congratulation, as an “enhanced” education Act. A significant feature of the Act is the expansion of high school from four to six years. It was applied, retrospectively, so that those who entered high school in June 2012 found that instead of the four-year course that they signed up for, they would not complete their course until April 2018.

Although the Act, extolling the purported virtues of “K-12” was only passed in 2013, we were bombarded with propaganda from the beginning of Aquino’s term in 2010.  Aquino’s Secretary of Education, Bro. Armin Luistro worked tirelessly, though not always truthfully, to sell the “K-12” concept.

There is no government department, more than the Department of Education (DepEd), which needs the support of the populace in order to achieve its goals. In the last millennium Raul Roco understood this, but since then there has been a fairly steady decline, culminating in Luistro’s immediate predecessor, Mona Valisno.

Luistro, a La Sallian, made the enormous mistake of treating the nation as though it were La Salle. A small community with its own idiosyncrasies and values is fine. If we do not like the community, we can always leave. But in practice, we as parents and students cannot disengage from the nation’s education system. This is most unfortunate since we no longer have faith in the system’s efficacy.

I believe this manifests itself in feedback received by our elected representatives which has given rise to complaints about homework. These complaints are a reflection of our low morale about the education system which we know is not, as promised by Luistro, globally competitive.

La Salle has much to answer for. In 2000, parents of students attending Bacolod’s University of St. La Salle – Integrated School heard their mentor Bro. Gus Boquer (also Luistro’s Ph.D mentor) say that he was not interested in students’ performance in the then national examinations NEAT (for Grade 6 students) and NSAT (taken at the completion of high school) but that what he was interested in was “holistic” education. Luistro, as Boquer’s protegé, continued with this concept but translated it to a national setting. Consequently, we now have an education system which lacks real goals. We, as parents, see this.

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What to do?

The first thing is to recognize that homework is not the problem. We are anxious to support our students but we are also pragmatic. We want to see results. K-12 is not performing.

Parents are ambitious for their children. We want them, if possible, to attend tertiary education. The red tape which forces our students to unnecessarily complete six years of high school education before they can apply to attend tertiary institutions wastes time and money.

Dr. Leonor Briones, DepEd secretary, has played the good soldier and has carried on where Luistro left off. But we need a radical change. RA 10533 has failed. The sooner we admit this, the better it will be for the next generation.

It seems unlikely that we shall see much, if any, change during president Duterte’s term. This is regrettable because in campaign speeches in early 2016, Duterte expressed concern about the value of K-12.

He was right./PN

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