Who doesn’t remember seemingly endless afternoons on weekdays, or worse, on weekends, spent tied to one’s desk at home laboring over homework?
Or who doesn’t remember rushing through breakfast on a school day to finish an assignment due that day?
For many a student and adult, memories of school are replete with horror stories of many hours spent laboring over homework—including projects and crafts—while daylight slowly dimmed and the sounds of one’s playmates enjoying themselves outside faded with dusk.
Well, for learners today and in the near future, such memories may soon fade into forgetfulness, if some legislators and lobby groups have their way.
For Tutok to Win party list Rep. Sam Verzosa, Filipino students these days are “overworked,” alleging that a child spends as much as 10 hours in school on weekdays. Some years back, global education assessments placed Italian learners as the most overworked, with nine hours spent on homework a week.
A global review reveals, however, that time spent on school assignments does not translate into better grades for students or better results for educational outcomes nationwide. Italy’s ranking in international assessments was relatively low in a 2014 study. While students in South Korea, whose education system ranked number one in the world in the same review, only spend 2.9 hours on homework weekly.
And of course, we all know the dismal ranking of Filipino students in similar international assessments, with learners landing at the bottom, or very near the bottom, of rankings, even when compared to much poorer countries.
It makes sense, then, for Verzosa to propose a “no homework law” that would prevent teachers from giving homework to elementary and high school students during weekends so that the children could “rest and recharge.”
This isn’t the first time that a cap on assignment loads has been attempted. A 2010 Department of Education (DepEd) memorandum circular advised teachers to limit the giving of homework to public elementary school students to a reasonable quantity on weekdays, while no homework is to be given on weekends. At least three bills were in fact filed to institutionalize this for all elementary and high schools across the country.
But in the intervening years, despite efforts to institute a “no homework” policy on weekends, these have remained pending before the House basic education and culture committee.
“The Filipino youth are overworked and yet the Philippines is trailing behind other countries,” Verzosa said in his privilege speech. He cited reports that the average intelligence quotient of Filipinos was 81.64, while the global average IQ was 100. The Philippines ranked 111th out of 199 countries in average IQ.
In addition, said Verzosa, the country has the highest dropout rate among Southeast Asian countries, with lack of interest in school as one of the reasons cited. “This only shows that school is not fun anymore,” he said.
This plays against a background of the “learning losses” that children worldwide experienced as a result of the school lockdowns enforced in the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Philippines, with one of the longest such lockdowns in the world, certainly felt the toll, with “blended learning” proving to be a dismal failure, especially in areas with bad communications infrastructure.
Our educational crisis also takes place amid a history of failed policies that have resulted in our current crisis. A report by the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), observes that students are “not truly learning but merely progressing” through the school system. The study linked the “unofficial” policy of mass promotion of students to poor learning outcomes.
PBEd executive director Justine Raagas said that there is an apparent misunderstanding among participants about the concept of “No child left behind” which “led to the literal practice of passing students” or promoting them to the next grade level regardless of their competencies. Teachers, it seems, prefer to pass on the responsibility of ensuring a student’s competency to the next grade teacher.
Amid these seemingly insurmountable problems besetting the education system, the DepEd and policymakers should make sense of the many well-meaning proposals to address the learning losses and the poor quality of public education. Bills like the no-homework-on-weekends and that which seeks to revise or abolish the K-12 program must be thoroughly discussed, not only by legislators but by the education sector itself, to see if these will really help improve the education of our children or just become additional distractions. It’s about time the DepEd, Congress, and other education stakeholders get their act together and do their own homework.