K-to-12 to make a big difference

The Facebook invite for my 20th-year high school reunion is unanswered in my Events tab. Not that I don’t want to attend—Lord knows it would be so great to see those young, bright faces in the uploaded photo taken 20 years ago. And sure the six-hour flight going there would take me to another country away from my family, but that is not the main reason for my hesitation. If I’m really honest with myself, I am hesitant because of my shame for not finishing high school.

Well, technically I completed my secondary education because after the 9th grade I transferred to another school that graduated its students after the 10th grade. My parents then thought it made financial sense to move me from a 12-grade institution to a 10-grade one, especially since universities here in the Philippines make no distinction between them when evaluating a high school diploma. Due to this technicality, I effectively saved my parents two years worth of tuition and got my college diploma way ahead of classmates from my original high school. However, despite all that, I still feel I do not measure up.

Putting aside feelings of inadequacy that harken back to those awkward teenage years, there is still a real disparity between people with two more years of education under their belt and those with two years less. People can argue until they are blue in the face as to quality versus quantity of education, but the fact remains that two more years of educational experience is just that—experience. Those two years of experience that every high schooler enjoys in almost every other country besides ours are a glaring point of comparison. This is akin to a two-inch difference in height that everyone in our basketball-crazy country knows makes a huge difference in performance.

More to the point, when I was in high school, the 3.5-inch floppy disc with its 1.44-MB capacity was in vogue. Now, my children have the Cloud, and digital information is measured in terabytes—equivalent to over 754,000 floppy discs! With this much potential information that needs to be assimilated, it is unthinkable that we would be letting our kids make do with less years of educational experience than all other youngsters in the world.

As a society, we are falling woefully short in many respects. I don’t have to mention our county’s infamous ranking (worst airport) or lack of something (not ranked in the Top 400 World University Rankings) to prove this. I don’t have to remind anyone of our lackluster performance at the recent SEA Games or the fact that we are basically fending off the schoolyard bully that is China with nothing more than spitballs. Thus, it goes without saying that providing our kids with two years less educational experience is no longer tenable. However, if as a nation, we implement the K-to-12 program, we are giving our children the ability to compete head-to-head internationally.

With that program in place, this time around, I know my boys will be able to attend their respective high school reunions with more pride than their dad.

—SOLIMAN DELARIARTE,

sdelariarte

@yahoo.com