UNIVERSITY OF PERPETUAL HELP SYSTEM DALTA

Las Pińas, City

Philippines
INSTITUTE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

POSITION PAPER_____________________________________________________________
Subject: MAED04 417 CURRENT TRENDS AND
TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING
LEARNING
Student: ANGELIQUE A. CUSTODIO
Professional Lecturer: CAYETANO A. NICOLAS, MIT, Ed.D-EM,DT
Topic: EDUCATION REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES
_____________________________________________________________________________

EDUCATION REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES

Isagani Cruz

“By 2015,” says Emmanuel Y. Angeles, who now chairs the Commission on Higher
Education (CHED), “the 10 ASEAN countries will open their borders, and by 2020, the
Philippines will join the APEC Trade Regime. Before these two events happen, we have to
prepare our graduates to be globally competitive. There are no other alternatives but to align our
degree programs with those of other countries.”

This is the main reason that the members of the Presidential Task Force for Education
(PTFE), particularly CHED, are rushing the addition of at least one more and even two more
years to our education cycle. All other countries in the world have 15 or 16 years of education
from Grade 1 to undergraduate graduation. The Philippines has the shortest education cycle in
the world (only 10 years of public basic education and usually only 4 years of undergraduate
education, for a total of 14).European countries have 12 years of basic education and 3 years of
undergraduate education. The United States and Asia-Pacific countries have 12 years of basic
education and 4 years of undergraduate education. (Myanmar is an exception because it has only
11 years of basic education before 4 years of undergraduate education. India is also an exception,
because it has only 3 years of undergraduate education after 12 years of basic education.)

When CHED first announced its intention to impose a minimum of 5 years for
undergraduate education, everyone raised a how, including me. When I was recently given a
copy by CHED of the key points of the PTFE report, however, I realized that there were some
good things to be said about the plan.

It has to be clear that not all college students need to stay for 5 years. Students who go to private
schools with Grade 7 already have 11 years of basic education, and the present 4-year college
already gives them 15 years. Degrees that do not need international recognition can and should
be obtained after only 4, maybe even 2 or 3 years of undergraduate study.
 The need for having as many years in the education cycle as other countries have is
relevant only to professional courses where international agreements are already in place, such as
engineering. It is also clearly needed in courses where Filipinos generally have a hard time
passing foreign examinations, such as nursing. It is foreseeable that, in the near future, certain
professional courses will also have their own international standards for purposes of mutual
recognition of degrees, such as education. In simpler terms, this means that, if we go to school
for the same number of years as students in other countries, we do not have to take foreign
exams in medicine, nursing, education, engineering, accounting, and other professions to practice
in those other countries. Think of it this way: our doctors, nurses, teachers, accountants,
engineers, and other professionals can be hired immediately in other countries without the need
for additional training or exams. A good example of how equivalencies work is the Washington
Accord (1989), an international agreement that specifies that a professional engineer must have
gone to school for at least 16 years if she or he wants to practice in another country. With only
10 years of public basic education and even with 5 years of engineering, we are still one year
short. Another often-cited international agreement is the Bologna Accord (1999), which specifies
that professional accountants, pharmacists, physical therapists, and so on should have at least 3
years of undergraduate education in addition to 12 years of basic education. Again, our 14-year
education cycle is one year short.

Like it or not, our entire economy now depends on Filipinos working abroad. The more
Filipino professionals we send abroad, the better it will be for our economy, since they will earn
a lot more than less-skilled OFWs. That sounds like we are exporting and exploiting human
beings, but with our country in the mess that it is in right now, we have no choice but to depend
on our overseas heroes. In fact, since most Filipinos want to live and work abroad anyway, there
is no reason to think that ensuring employment abroad through equivalent local education will be
met with resistance. Why, then, is adding years to the education cycle encountering resistance?
The answer is simple: students and parents cannot afford the extra year of food, clothing, shelter,
and lost income. How, then, should we sell the idea of adding more years to our education cycle?
First, of course, is connecting the added years to jobs abroad. This is the carrot that will make the
stick less painful. Second and equally important is insisting that not every college course has to
have an added year. Only those that produce graduates working abroad as professionals need the
extra year.

What are we learning?

Just as important as the number of years we spend in school is what we are learning. How
does the typical undergraduate course taken in the Philippines compare with those of the best
schools in the world? For a start, let us compare our General Education (GE) Program with those
in the leading schools in the USA, the UK, and our own ASEAN region. Representative of the
American system is the undergraduate degree at Harvard University. The degree program usually
takes four years to complete. Harvard offers full courses (equivalent to our 3 units) and half-
courses (1.5 units). All students take 8 half-courses in a Program in General Education,
consisting of Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical and
Mathematical Reasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the Physical
Universe, Societies of the World, and United States in the World. The subjects are spread over
the first three years of college and add up to roughly one full year of study or a quarter of the
entire college course. All students are also required to have a half-course in Expository Writing
(our “Freshman English”) and one full course in a foreign language (if they do not pass an
exemption test or if they are not foreign students). At the University of Oxford in the UK, there
is no equivalent to our GE program. Immediately upon admission, students take what we call
“major subjects.” A good compromise between the American system with a general education
curriculum and the British system with none is that of the top university in the ASEAN region,
the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of NUS,
for example, uses a Modular System, consisting of Modules (our “subjects”) and Modular
Credits (our “units,” each Module usually having 4 MCs). The minimum number of MCs to
graduate with a degree is 120, taken in three years. Students normally enroll for an honors
(spelled “honors”) degree, which needs another one or two years of residence. Half the time is
spent on Single Major Modules (our “major subjects”). The other half is spent on General
Education Modules (at least two), Singapore Studies (one module), Exposure Modules (at least
three), and various electives that the student wants. The General Education Modules consist of
two general areas: Information and Knowledge Content or Knowledge and Modes of Inquiry.
What is our own General Education Curriculum (GEC) like? We have two models, one for
students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, and communication (GEC-A) and another
for everyone else (GEC-B). GEC-A has 63 units. GEC-B has 51.

A typical undergraduate degree needs at least 60 units in addition to the GEC units, for a
total of about 120 units, just like Harvard and NUS. Notice, however, that an NUS student
spends only three years in college. The difference can be attributed to the number of credits per
subject or module: NUS has 4, we have only 3. More important than the number of units and
even the number of years spent in college, however, is the content of the General Education
courses.

In college, we still teach such subjects as Algebra, Statistics, Basic Economics, General
Psychology, Politics and Governance, Society and Culture, Arts Appreciation, Introduction to
Philosophy, and Anthropology, not to mention English, Filipino, and all sorts of legislated
content (Taxation, Agrarian Reform, Family Planning, Population Education, Rizal, Philippine
History, Philippine Constitution). Compare these subjects with those offered as general
education courses at Harvard and NUS. The Presidential Task Force on Education (PTFE) has
correctly observed that most, if not all of our GEC subjects are taken in high school in other
countries, including Singapore. Our first-year college students, in other words, are really high
school students. “Earlier this month, at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting,
Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican who served as education secretary and
president of the University of Tennessee, urged colleges to consider three-year degrees, calling
them the higher education equivalent of a fuel-efficient car.”
We can learn at least two lessons: first, General Education courses (if they are at all needed in
college) should be issue or competency-based, not discipline-based; second, college years should
be lessened, not increased.

Not Grade 7

Since what we learn in school is just as important as how long we take to learn it, then
lengthening the education cycle means changing the curriculum. To make this clearer, let us take
an example. Let us take the standard 120 units (hours, credits, or modular credits) that a student
needs to finish a college degree. In the American system which we inherited, the student takes
four years to finish the units. Roughly, that translates to 30 units per year (divided by semesters,
terms, or quarters). At 3 units per subject, the student takes 10 subjects (courses or modules) per
year. (In reality, a college student takes many more than 10 subjects per year, because of various
other courses each school or government requires, but let us make our example simple.) Since
students in Singapore take only 3 years to finish the 120 units, each subject or module cannot
have only 3 units; otherwise, each student will be taking 13 or 14 subjects per year. This is one
reason Singapore gives 4 units per subject, making each student take only 10 subjects or modules
per year, the same number as in the American model. Some people have suggested that, in order
to add the extra year to the education cycle, we should just let our students take the 120 units
over 5, rather than 4 years. We can see from the example that this is not as simple a solution as it
looks. Instead of taking 10 subjects per year, a student would now take only 24 units or 8
subjects per year. That would be an awful waste of time, since some students even now take as
many as 21 units in a half-year or semester. On the other hand, some people have suggested that,
in order to approximate the British model, we should have only 3 and not 4 years of college. This
means that we have to follow the Singapore model and give 4 units per subject, lessening the
number of subjects students take. For administrators, that is a nightmare, because teachers will
teach fewer subjects and therefore earn less than they are earning now. This will most likely lead
to labor unrest in our schools.

Clearly, the solution cannot be mechanical. We cannot just extend 4-year College into 5-year
College or compress 4-year College into 3-year College, without doing many other things first.

Fortunately, we have a Philippine best practice to guide us in this matter of length versus
content. When De La Salle University shifted from a semestral to a trimestral system in 1981,
teachers had to rethink their syllabi. It was not just a matter of teaching 18 weeks’ worth of
material in 14 weeks. That would have been not just impossible, but pedagogically unsound. The
expected learning competencies per subject, and therefore the entire curriculum, had to be
revised. Let us take a fairly simple example. In a course on the novel, a typical literature major
can be reasonably expected to read a novel and to write a short paper on it every two weeks.
(Some teachers require more, but let us take the average.) In a semester, that means 9 novels in
18 weeks. In a trimestral system, that means only 7 novels in 14 weeks. That is a major change.
The missing two novels have to be taken up in another subject in the curriculum. In short,
changing the time it takes to teach a subject changes the content of the subject. If the same
principle is now extended to the whole education cycle, changing the length of the education
cycle changes what can be taught during that cycle. It is, therefore, not just a matter of saying
that there should be a Grade 7 or a Fifth or Sixth Year High School or a Pre-University Year in
college. Just as important as the decision on when to add the missing year or years is the decision
on how to change the entire curriculum to make it rational and effective. Moreover, a totally new
15-year curriculum, if implemented in June 2010, will produce students graduating not earlier
than 2025 (2026 if we want 16 years). Since the Philippines will join the APEC Trade Regime in
2020, we cannot start curriculum change with Grade 1. Let us forget, therefore, about adding a
Grade 7. It will be useless in terms of meeting the deadline for international accreditation. It will
take too much time, effort, and money to revise the entire elementary school curriculum just to
have a Grade 7.

In the Philippines, we follow, though not strictly, the American model. We should know,
therefore, the American justification for general education. The worst thing we can do is to have
general education just because the Americans have it. “This distinctively American approach to
undergraduate education,” he admitted, “is not the prevailing pattern in most other countries with
strong universities. In most of Europe and in China, students choose their major field of study
when they apply for admission. Once admitted, they do not have the freedom that you have to
test your interest in a wide variety of subjects; they specialize immediately. Similarly, in much of
the world, students choose a profession in their final year of secondary school; they begin the
study of law and medicine as first year undergraduates.” He stressed that the concept of general
education has changed: “The freedom to explore in the first two years hasn’t always been a
feature of undergraduate education in America. Until the middle of the 19th century, there were
very few elective courses at Yale and other leading American colleges. Everyone in Yale
College took a common set of courses focused on classical Greek and Latin, science,
mathematics and philosophy, and the vast majority of students in law and medical schools
entered directly from secondary school. The expansion of the number of elective courses, the
requirement that students choose a major after two years of general study, and the definition of
professional schools as postgraduate institutions evolved gradually during the 50 years following
the Civil War. “The most eloquent justification for a broad, unspecialized and non-vocational
undergraduate curriculum is found in a report written by Yale’s President Jeremiah Day in 1828.
At the core of Day’s argument was the belief, which we at Yale share today, that your education
should equip you to think independently and critically, and to respond flexibly to new
information, altering your view of the world as appropriate.” Although I helped craft the General
Education Curriculum (GEC) for CHED, I now have very serious reservations about it. I think
that the GEC as it now stands properly belongs to high school, not to college.
High school in college?

It is clear that we have no choice but to add at least one more year to our 14-year
education cycle.

It is also clear that we cannot add the missing year to elementary school, because we would have
to wait 7 years for a Grade 1 student to finish Grade 7, 4 more years to finish high school, and 4
more years to finish college. By that time, it would be 2010 plus 15 or 2025, too late for the
international deadline of 2020. If we added the missing year to high school, we would have to
wait only 9 years (5 years for a first year high school student to finish Fifth Year plus 4 years of
college). That would be 2010 plus 9, just making the international deadline. Unfortunately, we
cannot add the missing year to high school. There are two main reasons for this. One is that the
government cannot afford another year of free education. Fifth Year will have fewer students
than Grade 7, but there will still be plenty of schoolrooms to build, teachers to hire, and desks
and textbooks to purchase. The other reason is that the private sector cannot afford an extra year
in high school. If we added a year to high school, there would be a year when there will be no
students entering college, because they will all still be in Fifth Year. (This would actually happen
even if the extra year were Grade 7.) For many, if not most, private colleges and universities that
would mean financial doom, since first year students traditionally contribute the most to tuition
income.

CHED wants to solve a problem (the lack of years) of basic education through higher
education. That, of course, seems inappropriate, because CHED is not supposed to worry about
basic education. Somebody, however, has to worry about it. DepEd cannot worry about it
because it does not have the money to solve it, even if it wants to. The state and local universities
and colleges should not worry about it because they have a lot more issues to worry about
(starting with their, in general, very little money and low standards). Who are left to worry about
it? The private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Since it is CHED that monitors private
HEIs, then CHED has to worry about it, even if it has no mandate to do so.

(Actually, this situation will be legalized or rationalized once EDCOM 2 convenes. Already, the
two key movers of EDCOM 1 – Senator Edgardo J. Angara and Congressman Salvador H.
Escudero III – are agreed that it is time to revisit the original EDCOM. Expect serious work on
EDCOM 2 to start once the elections are over.) If we added the missing year to college, we
would have to wait only 5 or 6 years before our graduates will have finished a 15 or 16-year
education cycle, enough time to make the international deadline of 2020. We must remember,
however, that it is not just quantity but also quality that is at issue here. We better make sure that
the extra year is not wasted. The first thing to do is to revamp the General Education Curriculum
(GEC). Many of the subjects are not college-level and should be integrated into high school
anyway. Although CHED is the main proponent of the added year, DepEd has to get into the
picture, because the Basic Education Curriculum (BEC) also has to be revised to include some of
the GEC courses. (The BEC is, in fact, being revised right now.) The second thing is to
understand that the extra year should focus on subjects that will prepare the student for college
work (“college” as defined by Harvard and Oxford). We can call the extra year Pre-University,
Pre-Baccalaureate, Junior College, Community College, College Zero, Associate Year, or
whatever; the name should not matter. What matters is that private HEIs can and should now
offer a year when high school graduates who intend to obtain an undergraduate degree can take
the tool subjects most useful for high-level academic work. This proposal answers the main
objection of private HEIs to the plan to extend basic education. Because it will be the HEIs that
will take care of the extra year, they will not experience one year with no incoming freshmen.

College not for all

A look at the latest list of job vacancies from the Department of Labor and Employment
(DOLE) is instructive. Of the top 20 vacancies, only 6 require a college degree (three kinds of
nurses, technology information officer, occupational therapist, and technical support staff). The
rest need only high school diplomas (if at all) or, at most, a couple of years of post-secondary
education. When we talk about the mismatch between education and industry, here is a clear
mismatch: we think we need college education to get jobs, when industry itself does not require
college degrees for most of its available jobs. The Presidential Task Force for Education (PTFE)
has hit upon the correct solution to this mismatch. It recommends that we should not expect
everybody to go to college. In technical language, this is called streaming. The PTFE
recommends that high school graduates be streamed into either college or technical-vocational
(tech-voc) programs.

For tech-voc, our current ten-year basic education cycle is enough. With some
improvements to be brought about by moving some college General Education Curriculum
(GEC) subjects down to high school, the public school system should be able to prepare students
to go into a tech-voc program that may take anywhere from one to three years. After that, the
students can join the job market immediately. For college-bound students, the current ten-year
basic education cycle is definitely not enough, for reasons I already spelled out. For these
students, a two-year transition course is necessary. This is the Junior College or Pre-University
(or whatever name it will eventually be called) that I am talking about. If what is left in the GEC
is incorporated into this Junior College, then real college work can be done in only two or three
years, as in most of the other countries in the world.

For those degrees that do not need international accreditation, students will use two years
for major courses. This means that undergraduate courses in arts and sciences will have a total of
four post-secondary years (exactly the same as we have now). For those degrees that need
international accreditation through the Bologna Accord (which requires 15 years from Grade 1),
students will have to have three years after Junior College. This means that Accountancy,
Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, and some other majors will have a total of five post-secondary
years (this is not what we have today for some of these majors). For those degrees that need
international accreditation through the Washington Accord or the APEC Registry (minimum: 16
years), students will have to have four years after Junior College. This means that Engineering
and Architecture will need six post-secondary years (this is not what we have today).

Education reform

The Final Report of the Presidential Task Force for Education (PTFE) contains several
recommendations to reform our educational system. Many of these recommendations are not
new, but were widely discussed and agreed upon in earlier surveys, such as the Congressional
Commission on Education (EDCOM, 1992) and the Presidential Commission on Educational
Reform (PCER, 2000). Allow me to pick out certain recommendations that I find most
interesting. For basic education, the PTFE (echoing EDCOM, PCER, and DepEd itself)
recommends, among other things, the use of vernacular languages: “It is important to strengthen
the use of mother tongue or lingua franca as the language of instruction in the early years of
schooling. This facilitates student learning of all subjects, including science and mathematics, the
national language and English as a global lingua franca.” All (and I mean all without exception)
studies of language and learning, both here and abroad, show that young students learn more
quickly and more effectively if taught in their mother tongue. Those advocating the exclusive use
of English as medium of instruction in basic education are, to use the late DepEd Secretary Raul
Roco’s word when describing them, idiots, because they refuse to acknowledge what every
researcher and every country in the world already know – that using a foreign language as
medium of instruction in grade school is guaranteed to make young children illiterate. (The late
DepEd Secretary Andrew Gonzalez used even more colorful language when describing
intellectually-challenged kibitzers; it was Gonzalez who institutionalized the current DepEd
policy of using the lingua franca as medium of instruction for the first three grades.) The PTFE
also recommends that teachers should visit homes. There are teachers who do visit the homes of
their students, but they are the exceptions. Most teachers have no time left for such a crucial duty
after they teach, do lesson plans, fix their classrooms, and prepare for frequent non-teaching
duties (such as preparing food for “The Visitation of the Gods,” as the classic short story by
Gilda Cordero Fernando puts it).

In the old days (even allowing for a little nostalgia), teachers were held in high regard in
their communities. They were called maestra or maestro and often consulted in all matters.
Today, many deans of schools of education lament, education is usually the career reserved for
the least gifted of siblings. “Mag-titser ka na lang” (you are only good enough to be a teacher) is
often the advice given to such children.

For higher education, the PTFE notes that “in Singapore and European countries, the last
2 years of pre-university are very similar to the first 2 years of general education in Philippine
colleges. . . . We, thus, propose benchmarking the first two years of our 5-year professional
programs with the 2-year pre-university programs in Singapore and European countries. What is
important in the discussion of a 12-year pre-university program is to specify the content of the
11th and 12th years and benchmark these with programs abroad.”

For technical-vocational education, PTFE has extended the current Ladderized Education
Program (LEP), because students streamed into polytechnics are automatically ladderized if they
wish to continue to the university.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) need not worry that they will lose students to the
polytechnic stream. Most of our HEIs can offer both polytechnic and university courses and,
therefore, still capture all of our high school graduates.

There are only a handful of HEIs that do not and should not offer polytechnic courses. These are
what are known as “research universities.” These are, for example (in alphabetical order), Ateneo
de Manila University, De La Salle University, UP Diliman, UP Los Baños, UP Manila, and UST.
In these universities, even if teaching is valued and rewarded, internationally-recognized
research is always considered more important than excellent teaching. One cannot imagine any
of these universities offering TESDA courses such as Automotive Servicing, Massage Therapy,
or Training for Household Service Workers. Most of the other 2,000-plus HEIs in the country,
however, will not have any identity problems offering TESDA-related courses (perhaps not
Massage Therapy, but Animation, Software Development, and Finishing Course for Call Center
Agents). What will happen, then, if the PTFE recommendations are fully implemented, is that
most HEIs will have two types of students – those in the polytechnic stream that may or may not
continue to the university stream, and those already in the university stream. The PTFE has many
more recommendations, including necessary legislation (such as giving CHED more teeth). It
will be impossible for the present government, with only a year to go, to implement all of them,
but there is nothing to prevent it from starting to implement at least a couple of them before we
elect a new President and have new heads of DepEd, CHED, and TESDA.
SYNTHESIS:
All studies of language and learning, both here and abroad, show that young students
learn more quickly and more effectively if taught in their mother tongue.
This was primarily aimed to strengthen the Philippine basic education curriculum and
increase the number of years of basic education. The new program covers Kindergarten plus 12
years of basic education. This program a student will be required to undergo kindergarten, six
years of elementary, four years of junior high school and two years of Senior High School. The
additional two years in senior high school was targeted to prepare students for tertiary education,
middle level skills development, entrepreneurship, and global employment. The implementation
of the new program, this study is geared towards assessing the readiness of Colleges and
Universities to bridge the gap brought about by the implementation of the senior high school
program. The idea of embracing innovation in education is pressing to effecting change in the
educational reform agenda in the Philippines. The successful implementation comes when the
teachers and educational institutions decide to adopt; thus, making preparation plans to embrace
the new curriculum and be ready to undertake changes to its full implementation are among the
challenges to accept realistically. Under the new General Education curriculum, undergraduate
students are exposed to various domains of knowledge and ways of comprehending social and
natural realities, developing in the process, intellectual competencies, and civic capacities. The
CHED’s Memorandum Order number 20, series of 2013 provides the framework and rationale of
the revised GE curriculum as a paradigm shift and in the context of the K to 12 curriculum based
on college readiness standards.
Quality education is the best that the country can offer, a call that leads to quality
employment for a better quality of life.

References:
https://isaganicruz.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/education-reform-in-the-philippines/
https://4freeessays.com/essays/education-reform-in-the-philippines