At the latest Trade and Industry Development Update on “Enhancing Philippine Competitiveness” held recently by the Department of Trade and Industry and the Board of Investments, the Department of Education through Undersecretary Dina Ocampo walked industry representatives through the K-to-12 curriculum, perhaps for the first time.
Trade Undersecretary Adrian Cristobal Jr. explained that this latest engagement with the public by the DTI and the BOI grew from the Industry Roadmaps initiative that their agencies launched in 2012, “to forge strategic partnerships with industry stakeholders, particularly the private sector.” The roadmaps were meant to show each industry’s vision, goals and targets and the required government interventions to reach those targets.
“Our goal was to encourage both industry and government agencies to formulate their own short, medium and long term plans,” Cristobal said.
Since then, 26 industries have submitted their roadmaps to the DTI, 12 of which were actually rolled out last year. Four more industries are drafting theirs; seven industry associations have expressed serious interest in joining the DTI effort for 2014.
Cristobal said horizontal issues became evident while studying the roadmaps. Across industries, the current quality of our education system was invariably cited as a binding constraint to growth, but for all industries, education itself is clearly a strategic element for growth.
“But exactly what aspects of education? The information cannot be readily found in the roadmaps. For that, we need to understand the question better. This is why the Trade and Industry Development Updates on the K-to-12 curriculum was organized,” he said.
Ocampo said DepEd’s role is to find a direct connection for students and their future. “In articulating the K-to-12 curriculum, we aim to bring back the interest and point of view of the learner. Our intent [as educators] is for them to be learners on their own,” she said.
In any discussion with industry and other education stakeholders on what the curriculum is supposed to be, Ocampo added, the emphasis invariably focuses on the discipline: what must be learned, when and how.
The intended—as opposed to implemented—K-to-12 curriculum envisions “holistically developed Filipinos with 21st-century skills” covering information, media and technology, learning and innovation, life and career. The explicit learning areas are language, technology and livelihood, mathematics and science, and arts and humanities.
With these skills, the learner has four career paths to choose from as he exits basic education: higher education, employment, entrepreneurship, and middle-level skills development. But even as he takes a leap into the real world through any of these avenues, the learner will still leave basic education with a little of everything else.
Ocampo pointed out that in fact what the K-to-12 curriculum does is to provide the learner with more space to explore career options and life choices. The curriculum needs to be inclusive, but “inclusive” can be tricky.
“For [DepEd], this means that the curriculum is not dissociated from the learner’s knowledge set. As we see it, the basic education curriculum must resolve seamlessly into higher education or technical-vocational curricula,” she said.
She added that from the basic education standpoint, the process of exploration is more important than the exit. (This view differs from that of industry, which focuses on the competencies and skills that the learner has mastered upon exit.)
The K-to-12 system provides for specialization tracks in senior high school, but unfortunately, the learners’ access to these are limited by what the school can provide. To bridge this resource gap, the Eggie Apostol Foundation (EAF) launched the Education Revolution in 2003 to encourage communities to step up and organize themselves to improve the schools that serve them. This later evolved into the 5775 Movement, a private-sector-led, community-driven education reform agenda spearheaded by the League of Corporate Foundations, Philippine Business for Education, Ateneo Center for Education Development, Synergeia Foundation, Philippine Business for Social Progress, and EAF.
Ocampo emphasized that language is a fundamental learning area in the 21st-century context because it enables collaboration. This fact is actually a strategic linchpin for the Information Technology and Business Process Management
(IT BPM) industry, which has been exhibiting phenomenal growth. As shown in the roadmap presented to the DTI by senior executive director Gillian Joyce Virata and Rosanna Vidal, human resources consultant of the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (Ibpap), the IT BPM industry expects to generate around $25 billion in revenue and around 1.3 million jobs by 2016.
The framers of Republic Act No. 10533 or the
K-to-12 Law clearly understood this when they mandated the implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) in the early grades. Ocampo, who has consistently advocated MTBMLE, said this is what the K-to-12 curriculum is meant to do: provide the learner with the space to express his thoughts in a language that he knows.
“At any stage in the learning continuum, the outcomes must be measurable, palpable, and most of all useful. What we all want is for our learners to have a real-world education,” Ocampo said.
Butch Hernandez (butchhernandez@gmail.com) is the executive director of the Eggie Apostol Foundation and education lead for talent development at Ibpap.