To enjoy CHEd scholarship teachers to spend first

Its advocates aver that the main goal of the K-to-12 program is global competitiveness. The inclusion of skills training in the proposed curriculum belies this. It now appears to me that employability is the insidious purpose of K-to-12, on the assumption that high school dropouts need to land a job when they cannot proceed to college. If this is so, why overhaul a good system that has been there for almost a century to accommodate a segment of our student population that cannot enter higher education?

The solution has been there all the time: the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda). And perhaps more Tesda schools in the countryside. And perhaps an authority for high schools to open a TVET (technical education-vocational training) program, at little cost to government. The TVET program will render K-to-12 unnecessary.

I believe that the matter of global competitiveness can be advanced and harnessed at the post-graduate level of higher education, not in the basic education curriculum. Nonsurvivors of the current high school education system constitute a majority of our student population, and addressing their plight should not prejudice the few who are qualified to enter college after high school.

Graduates of Asian Institute of Management, Ateneo Graduate School, UP Graduate School, among other higher education institutions, are some of the best, even top executives, in the corporate world. Why should government not support graduate education instead?

On a personal note, I recently enrolled a member of my faculty under the CHEd Faculty Development Fund for Masters in Information Technology at Cebu Institute of Technology-University, a center of excellence in IT. I advanced the money for school fees, including the travel and allowance between Camotes Island and mainland Cebu. Then the bombshell: The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), according to the school office, will refund us only after one year when the application for faculty development shall have been approved!

We are a poor school, and we have already spent so much. They should call this “CHEd Scholarship Grant for Faculty At Your Expense First.” We quit.

I sent a list of 174 first-year students whose tuition fee is P6,000 each per semester, plus miscellaneous, to CHEd for scholarship grants. I am wondering what will be the response to that under the so-called CHEd “scholarship for poor students.”

—DR. AGUIDO A. MAGDADARO, MD, FPCP,

Mt. Moriah College, Poro, Cebu

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