K-to-12 curriculum review: What will be left for students to learn?

The Department of Education (DepEd) recently announced its plan to review the present K-to-12 curriculum because of the obvious congestion in the learning competencies. According to reports, the 2022 version of the new curriculum will be released by the end of 2021 and applied next year. The review is being undertaken to relieve students of overwhelming requirements in all their subjects.

The DepEd also admitted that 15,000 learning competencies had been removed last March from the former curriculum, reducing the number to less than 10 competencies per quarter per grade level.

What the DepEd isn’t telling us is that the curriculum currently being implemented and followed in all Philippine schools, both public and private, was based on the Most Essential Learning Competencies (MELCs), where 5,689 learning competencies were removed from the 14,171 learning competencies that the former curriculum had, resulting in a reduction of 40.15 percent.

The percentage of removed learning competencies is an unbelievably high 93 percent for English, 70 percent for Filipino, and 52 percent for Araling Panlipunan. This means the competencies needed to be learned and mastered by the students had already been cut by half.

Because of this nonfat MELCs, the number of competencies taught in the subject English in one school year has been reduced to only 10 competencies for both Grades 6 and 10. Only 15 competencies will be taught in Grade 5, 22 in Grade 8, and 23 in Grade 10.

If the DepEd continues with its plan to further reduce, geld, and emasculate what is already a spayed and castrated curriculum, what will be left for teachers to teach and students to learn?

Changing the curriculum also means the self-learning modules that had been procured at great expense by the DepEd would have to be changed again, thereby allowing already rich publishers and printers to become even richer, and opening wide the floodgates to the influx of even more error-riddled modules.

The DepEd must be called to account for this final straw that will surely break the camel’s back. The DepEd’s only reason for being is to teach Filipino schoolchildren the correct knowledge, skills, and values so that they will learn and grow up not being stupid and ignorant.

ANTONIO CALIPJO GO
Quezon City
sickbookstogo@gmail.com