The Philippine Online Chronicles

Mistaken Perspectives and Unimaginative Responses from the DepEd

The DepEd's decision to remove Science as a subject for Grade One students under the K12 program highlights the spirit of transforming education into a perfunctory and mindless process aimed not at cultivating minds but for pedantic qualifications for the elusive 'better future.' According to the DepEd, learning will be more enjoyable once science is pushed back as a subject for Grade Three students. Implicitly, this also allows students to spend less daily hours in school, in keeping with the move to reduce school time to half a day. This, supposedly, will make education more palatable for children.

Why do we need science and why doesn't DepEd like it?

Removing science for the sake of enjoyable education is like removing medicine to make more room for sugar – the means defeat the ends. DepEd's views on science illustrates one of the primary errors in education today: learning is no longer about self improvement and self fulfillment, but a simple, mindless task for diplomas whose meaning students don't quite understand. Remove the task, and you get less burden, more enjoyment. Science, however, is only as boring as its teachers and the pedagogy applied. Science reduced to memorizing concepts word for word becomes an interminable formula that students are bound to hate. But this is not the only model for teaching science. No Grade One student wants to choke down on text books that contain assorted facts and figures that find no relation to the lives that the students live. A possible solution is to focus on science as a perspective and tool that has allowed humans to find out more about the world – from what makes the sky blue and what keeps the night black, where humans came from, what the world is made of, and what makes the planets move. Science is boring once it becomes static, which every scientist knows it cannot be – precisely because there is always a divide between knowledge and reality, precisely because finite minds cannot comprehend every quark, cell, and crystal, there is always room for discovery, room for growth.

From a world of exploration to rote memorization

Education, however, is no longer about discovery, and no longer about pressing questions that demand resolution. Instead, it becomes an exercise in poring through a bare-bones dictionary of science words – students are made to memorize definitions, without any explanation as to how these concepts flowered and how it relates to life and the questions that kids have about it. Removing science from Grade One does not make Science more palatable. How science as a field is viewed by educators themselves is what makes Science dull and, frankly, unscientific. The essential curiosity that gave birth to science dies once it becomes a simple matter of getting passing grades by rote memorization, instead of an exploration of the world and its mysteries.

Two wrongs don't make one right

The goal of removing science from the Grade One curriculum is connected to the the assumption that a 12 year basic education program is the solution to the falling quality of education in the country. Just as pushing science back a couple of years does not make science more palatable, pushing graduation day a couple more years does nothing to make students smarter or better equipped for future employment. One of the common arguments in favor of the K12 program is that most other countries have already implemented the 12 year program in their own shores. This, however, defies one of the central ideas in education – tailoring and fitting an education program to the students' needs. The reason why there is an assortment of courses to choose from in college is because students are not all alike. Math might be hell for one student and heaven for another. The same idea applies in education in general – there is no need to force an entire population into a 12 year program just because everyone else is doing it.

Forgotten corollaries and unimaginative responses

And if transplanting the 12 year educational program is to work, various other corollaries must be resolved. Adding more years does nothing to an educational system where classrooms and teachers are lacking, where textbooks are missing, and where the fundamental principles of education and learning – that learning is for self-fulfillment and personal growth and not just for some illusory job in the future, which most will not get anyway, judging from the number of unemployed and underemployed graduates – are unpracticed. Presumably, a host of other countries thrive under the 12 year program. These countries, however, also focus more on their education budgets than in debt servicing and the military, which is what makes private schooling in other countries unnecessary in the face of a competent public school system. In short, the uncritical adoption of foreign strategies for our specific problems shows the lack of imagination in the DepEd which, of all government offices, should have the most of. Instead of revising the way teaching is done, DepEd simply tinkers with the curriculum and with the length of the process, instead of focusing on quality.

In the end, the issue is not about whether the current educational program is congested or not, as DepEd claims. The issue lies deeper than DepEd's lackluster imagination can handle. The issue is that we no longer see education as a means in itself, but only as a means to economic ends that the present economy cannot actually provide.

Santiago blogs at moreadventure.wordpress.com. He lives in Manila.

Photo: “quick, hide” by Shenghung Lin, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved