SHS

That means senior high school or Grades 11 and 12, the two additional years in our new K to 12 (kindergarten to Grade 12) basic education.

Those who entered Grade 7 last school year (2012-13) will be the first to be required the additional two years of SHS. This means they will do Grade 11 in 2016-17 and Grade 12 in 2017-18. That seems like a long way off, but we all be better prepared for the many challenges.

By “we,” I mean parents and others who will have to put children through SHS, as well as educational institutions. It will not just be high schools but also colleges and universities, which is why the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of the Philippines Diliman focused on this issue during our faculty conference last week.

We had two resource speakers who oriented us to these new challenges: Dr. Maria Serena Diokno of the UP history department and currently seconded as chair of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, and Dr. Marilou Nicolas, UP Diliman assistant vice president who talked on the Asean integration scheduled in 2015. (I won’t touch on this topic except to say that the proposed integration will include students being able to study in other Asean countries’ schools with reciprocal recognition of credits.)

The K to 12 program is now a law and we have to find ways to make it work.  We owe it to the students and their parents to make the additional two years worthwhile.

Tracks

On their part, parents and guardians will have to set SHS as a horizon, helping their children or wards to plan for the not very distant future. What will happen is that by Grade 10, students and their parents should be prepared to make a decision as to whether they will go on to one of three options: 1) technical/vocational, 2) sports and arts, and 3) academic.  The last option is what leads to college, with students having to choose from three streams: 1) humanities/education/social science, 2) science/technology/engineering/math, or 3) business/accounting/management.

There will be differences in SHS subjects, even schools, depending on what options the students take. Some schools will specialize in technical/vocational subjects, which should, in principle, produce graduates who will be ready to work right after SHS.  I’ve seen all kinds of proposals for this SHS track, from teachers’ aides to bartenders and tour guides, and I’m hoping the Department of Education will issue clearer guidelines soon on the offerings.  We have seen the rise and fall of too many “flavor of the month” short courses—for example, “caregiver” programs—trying to cash in on fleeting demands.

This tech/voc track does carry potential, especially if it can be integrated into ladderized degree programs.  For example, someone who finishes teacher’s aide training in SHS may work for a few years, and then decide to go back to college to train as a teacher, with some of the teacher’s aide training in SHS recognized for credit.  Some educational institutions, notably the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, already has such programs where someone may start out to train as an office clerk, then go to work, then return to PUP for more units to become an IT operator. All these courses presently require a high school diploma.  In the SHS system, we may just see some of the initial steps in the “ladder” incorporated into SHS.

I’ve seen very little information on the sports and arts track, but I suspect what will happen is that this track will be mainly oriented to those who will compete in sporting events or, for the arts, certain crafts.  A college degree in the humanities stream will still be an option for those who want to become coaches and performing arts mentors, or who pursue an academic career in universities as researchers and teachers.

The third track, the academic, is an expansion of what we have now in high schools as well as in the first two years of college (for example, history, ethics, sociology, psychology).  Note that the course titles will not use these specific tags because the subjects will be integrated or “blended,” meaning one subject will already have elements of sociology and psychology.  The natural sciences and math subjects will also be “blended,” so that students will get algebra, geometry, statistics and calculus.

The academic track is quite complicated, with students’ decisions about college determining what they will take in SHS. For example, students who want to go on to engineering in college will have more exposure to math.

At the height of the debates around the proposed K to 12, one of the arguments used for an additional two years was that our students were graduating from high school too young, usually around the age of 16, which meant they would have to make career choices quite early.

Ecotones

In the new system, students will be graduating from senior high school at the age of 18, presumably more mature.  But we see, too, that students are still being asked to make even more complicated decisions: tech/voc or sports and arts, or one of the three streams for the academic?  The academic track has raised the most concerns among college educators. There is talk about how UP’s entrance exams will have to be modified for the different streams.

Then there’s the problem of the students’ choices.  What happens if a student chooses the “humanities/education/social science” option in SHS then decides, in Grade 12, that he or she wants to enter engineering? With less exposure to math, that could affect their ability to get into a college engineering course.

All these concerns will be tackled, together with the even more daunting tasks of crafting the SHS subjects.  The universities are also being asked now to revise our courses because the SHS graduates will, we all hope, no longer need basic courses in the social and natural sciences, and in math.  Supposedly, the general education courses in college will move from a content focus (memorizing facts) to one that emphasizes skills of analysis and synthesis.

There were all kinds of questions that cropped up at our faculty conference last week—for example, will there be college admissions in 2016 and 2017? The answer there is yes, because some private schools have been on track with 12-year basic education even before it was required. That’s a small number of students, though, and it is not until 2021 that we will go back to having a full complement of students in all years. (In 2018, for example, we will start to get more freshmen, but will still have a tiny number of sophomores.)

But the most urgent challenges are in the formulation of new subjects and in training enough people to teach these subjects. I tend to look at these developments from the perspective of a biologist, the senior high schools forming “ecotones,” or environments that have mixed “ecological” characteristics—that of a high school and that of college.  Ecotones are usually zones of opportunities, allowing the emergence of new forms of life.  Likewise, our SHS can be environments for innovation, with students allowed to be more independent and linked to the outside world.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph