Business execs call for 12-year basic education

Seeing a need for serious reforms in the country’s education system, business executives have decided to form a group which will push for improvements in the same and revive the call for pre-tertiary bridge program.

Members of the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), a newly-organized group of chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief operating officers (COOs) representing different corporations, said there is a need to adopt a basic education sector reform agenda and evolve a globally responsive post-secondary education system.

This, they said, will seek to make every school perform better, get teachers to continuously improve their teaching skills, call for curriculum development, and extend the cycle of formal basic education from the current 10 years to 12.

PBEd’s idea of improving the quality of education in the Philippines calls for the re-establishment of the pre-tertiary bridge program, which encountered stiff opposition when the idea was first introduced several years ago.

Chito Salazar, a member of the group’s founding board, said the idea is to prepare the country’s students for college better through the establishment of a Grade 7 in the elementary level and a 5th year in high school.

Salazar said the period wherein students are supposed to be in school is 12 years, but in the Philippines, "it is squeezed to 10 years."

"Our fourth year graduates are technically 2nd year high school students," Salazar said during yesterday’s launch of PBEd at the Philamlife Tower in Makati City.

He said one of the additional benefits of a 12-year basic education system is the production of more mature graduates.

Salazar added that as a bonus, keeping young women in school is a non-controversial way to control population because studies have shown that the longer young women stay in school, the less chances they will become early mothers.

Salazar also stressed there was a need to improve English proficiency among young Filipinos without actually trying to force the young to learn it too early.

PBEd, he explained, is advocating the use of the mother tongue for primary school students, all the way to Grade 2, before they are slowly introduced to English or other languages.

He noted that the decline of the quality of education in the country is not about the medium of teaching used in school.

PBEd’s proposed framework for Philippine education notes that the Philippines still has the opportunity "to make the most of a large and growing population of hard-working, English-familiar, and relatively educated people."

What needs to be done, the group said, is to broaden and deepen the competitive advantage from the presence of a large segment of comparatively better educated and English speaking Filipinos.

PBEd said it believes in "an education system that is able to meet the demands of a national effort to successfully compete in the global economy based on the competitiveness of human resources.

The group further stressed that in the level of basic education, schools must enable young learners to master basic competenciesa in order to become "functionally literate."

And in post-secondary education, PBEd said learning institutions must be able to develop skilled, professional, and competitive people by creating, preserving, and communicating knowledge.

PBEd was formed after business executives found a need to act on the apparent decline in the quality of education in the Philippines as reflected in the results of National Achievement Tests and other examinations here and abroad.