Author Topic: What will be left for students to learn after the latest K-12 curriculum review?  (Read 2247 times)

Joe Carillo

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What will be left for students to learn after the latest K-12 curriculum review?
Commentary by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor

The Department of Education (DepEd) recently announced its plan to review the present K-12 curriculum “because of the very obvious congestion of the learning competencies. The 2022 version of the new curriculum will be released by the end of 2021 and applied next year.”

According to the DepEd, the review is being undertaken to relieve students of the current overwhelming requirements in all their subjects.” The DepEd also admitted that “15,000 learning competencies had been removed last March from the former curriculum, reducing them to less than 10 competencies per quarter per grade level.”

  IMAGE CREDIT: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
The DepEd’s K to 12 Basic Education Curriculum Framework:
“Why further reduce, geld, and emasculate the curriculum's learning competencies?”


What the DepEd isn’t telling us is that the curriculum currently being implemented and followed in all Philippine schools, both public and private, was based on the Most Essential Learning Competencies (MELCs), where 5,689 learning competencies have already been removed from the 14,171 learning competencies that the previous curriculum had, reducing the number of competencies by 40.15 % or almost half.

The percentage of removed learning competencies is an unbelievably high 93 % in English at, 70% in Filipino, and 52 % in Araling Panlipunan. This means that the competencies needed to be learned and mastered by the students had already been cut by half.

Because of this now much leaner MELCs, the number of competencies now being taught in English as subject in one school year have been brought down to only 10 competencies for both Grades 6 and 9. Those being taught in Grade 5 are now down to only 15 competencies, in Grade 8 down to only 22 competencies, and in Grade 10 down to only 23 competencies.

If the DepEd continues with its plan to further reduce, geld, and emasculate what is already a spayed, vasectomized, and castrated curriculum, what will be left for teachers to teach and students to learn?
This revision of the curriculum also means that the self-learning modules that DepEd had procured at great expense will have to be changed again, thereby allowing already filthy-rich publishers and printers to get even richer, as well as open wide the floodgates to the influx of even more error-riddled modules.

The DepEd must be called to account for this final straw, for it will surely break the camel’s back, so to speak. The DepEd’s only reason for being there at all is to teach Filipino schoolchildren true, good, and correct knowledge, skills and values so that they will learn and grow up not being stupid and ignorant and not remain poor.

It is not the pandemic that will kill our children. It is the DepEd people’s lack of intelligence, empathy, concern, and compassion for them.

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Mr. Antonio Calipjo Go, retired academic supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, is an advocate of good English usage who has been waging a crusade against badly written English-language textbooks in the Philippines for many years now. Several of his no-nonsense critiques have appeared in the Forum’s “Advocacies” section.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2021, 12:55:20 PM by Joe Carillo »