Ideas that went pfft

Cesar Gorillo .

I REALLY cannot understand the tendency of some of our intellectuals to implement their new ideas as against tried and historically tested successes just to prove that we need to venture into untested grounds with the main purpose of debunking old ideas.

I am referring to the many changes in our educational system despite the fact that the old system has produced people like Claro M. Recto, Manuel Roxas, Sergio Osmena, Jovito Salonga, Ninoy Aquino and many other great Filipinos who were schooled the old way.

Then comes these people at the Department of Education tinkering with the once disastrous ideas of implementing the bilingual system wherein teachers and students can use either Tagalog or English in their lessons from elementary up to college and we ended up producing graduates who could hardly speak English because they have been using Tagalog in their lessons.  Good that the idea was scrapped because I saw it from the very beginning as a monumental disaster.

Now comes this K-12 program.  Right from the very beginning, I was against this idea because it will put more burden on the millions of poor Filipinos whose additional high school years will add financial pain into their already depleted finances. But it went on and as of today, I could hear complaints because the Deped people assured the high school graduates that with their additional two years in high school, many will hire them already because they have been steeped with vocational knowhow.  But when these high school graduates applied for jobs, of course, they were told that the companies will only hire college graduates! Disaster! We just simply delayed the enrollment of these poor students to college for two years.  This is not to mention that thousands of college teachers lost their jobs because as of today, there are no more college students as all of them have already graduated and we have yet to start on the first year colleges in view of the graduation of senior high school students.

The K-12 program was added by another disaster when they forced all elementary graders to be taught in their native language because according to experiments and researches kuno, the children learn much better when they start learning in their native language.  My cousin in Surigao del Norte had a very hard time translating her mathematics lessons in the native language because that was the instructions from the higher ups.

My point is, the pupils will eventually go to higher education in which the very basic language used is English and why not teach them English at the time when their tongues are still soft and pliant and can pronounce the language correctly while still in their kindergarten rather than teach them when they are already old? Anyway, they can always learn their native language because that is used in their daily encounters.

For the life of me, I cannot see the logic of these programs. But what can we do? We are just mere spectators and can only vent our frustrations in our columns which do not merit any considerations anyway by these Deped people.

If our old system produced the likes of the great people I mentioned, I cannot see any more reason to doubt why we produce such kind of intellectuals under the old way of educating our young Filipinos. Ahay!