A call to overhaul the K-to-12 program

As a former secondary school teacher and mother whose youngest daughter, who graduated from high school in 2018, has been subjected to the K-to-12 program, I fully agree to all the pointers in “Another reason to overhaul K-to-12” (Editorial, 4/17/23).

The two years in senior high school was a waste of time for my daughter and loss of financial resources to my family as she continued with her Grades 11 and 12 in an all-girls school in Quezon City.

My daughter’s on-the-job-training (OJT) in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) strand in senior high school, as required of the K-to-12 curriculum, was just for the OJT per se, nothing gained at all. Why so? Early on, she was decided to proceed to a veterinary medicine course, but she was sent to an engineering firm for her OJT. I communicated with the school for my child to be sent to an OJT related to vet med, even volunteering myself to look for a company for her. But the school declined because my daughter was the only one who was interested in the vet med program. The school had its tie-ups with alumna partners for the students’ OJT program. Accordingly, the school could not send, for safety and monitoring purposes, any student on solo flight to a nonpartner organization.

But what did my child learn in an engineering construction firm? She and her classmates worked as office errand girls. It seemed to me that the OJT program was only for compliance and nothing more.

At 23 years old now, my youngest is still in fourth-year college with two years more to go before she finally graduates from the veterinary medicine course at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. On the other hand, both my eldest and middle daughters graduated from college at the age of 20. The two have become gainfully employed immediately thereafter, with my eldest in a study program in Australia now. The old curriculum was good after all. On the contrary, my youngest lagged behind because of the K-to-12 program. And what a waste of our family’s financial resources for Grades 11 and 12, of which we paid the exorbitant tuition in an exclusive school.

The K-to-12 program should be overhauled if, taken seriously, the findings of the Commission on Human Rights report that K-to-12 graduates find difficulty landing jobs as expected of them. It is a glaring fact that companies in the Philippines still prefer college graduates over those who finished K-to-12. And why subject all students to K-to-12 when the program has its loopholes?

Other underlying issues on the K-to-12 implementation must be looked into. School and teacher-related pressing concerns must better be highly prioritized over the ill-prepared K-to-12 program found to be ineffective after all.

BELEN DOCENA-ASUELO,

bdasuelo@yahoo.com