Tweaked curriculum

In this month dedicated to the national language – Buwan ng Wika – the government has launched a revised K-12 curriculum, which includes tweaking the use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction.

As stressed by President Marcos in his inaugural speech, he wants a renewed focus on improving English proficiency.

The new “Matatag” curriculum, two years in the making according to the Department of Education, has been “decongested” by 70 percent to focus on the basic competencies where young Filipinos have shown weakness: reading comprehension, science and mathematics.

Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte said Matatag has a slogan – “bansang makabata, batang makabansa, meaning DepEd’s programs and reforms are intentionally tailored to produce competent, job-ready, active, responsible and patriotic citizens.”

As for the meaning of “Matatag,” here it is, according to the government: “MAke the curriculum relevant to produce job-ready, active and responsible citizens; TAke steps to accelerate the delivery of basic education services and provision facilities; TAke good care of learners by promoting learner well-being, inclusiveness learning and positive learning environment; and Give support for teachers to teach better.”

They lost the readers at “MAke...”

There’s special focus in the reworked K-12 on the youngest learners from Kindergarten to Grade 3. I don’t know if the abstract concept of patriotism can be grasped at such an age. But if the concepts of belonging to one nation, of civic responsibility and the greater good can be instilled at an early age, perhaps by the time they reach adulthood, the kanya-kanya or to each his own mindset that has long been a bane in our society would have been minimized.

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Good luck in making the latest tweak in the medium of instruction work. It’s challenging to develop a sense of belonging to one nation when we can’t even agree on a dialect that can be used as the common medium of instruction nationwide. Regionalism always gets in the way. There are many Filipinos who prefer to use English rather than Tagalog-based Filipino (or is it now Pilipino?) in oral and written communication.

Ferdinand Marcos the elder could have used his dictatorship to impose the requirement for competency in one dominant dialect. But perhaps Ferdinand Senior was torn between his native Ilocano and Tagalog. And he liked to paint his martial law regime as a benevolent authoritarian government.

Also, as I have previously written, the Tagalog-based Filipino taught in schools is a formal one that can seem like a foreign language to young students familiar only with conversational Pinoy slang.

My generation could understand the formal Filipino because we had illustrated comic books/magazines that used such words extensively.

Maybe DepEd can revive those illustrated comics as learning tools, and also to encourage children to read. Addiction to social media and information platforms such as TikTok, where ideas are expressed in short phrases, abbreviated words and emojis, is wreaking havoc on oral and written communication skills in both Filipino and English.

As editor I have received numerous letters from members of the older generation. They are almost always well written, whether in English or Filipino. Many are handwritten, in excellent penmanship. Are children still taught proper writing by hand?

Math skills are even worse for the younger generations, thanks to dependence on gadgets. Store clerks use their phone calculators for the simplest addition and subtraction. I’m also math-challenged, but I can do basic mathematical calculations quickly in my head. Schools should ban the use of cell phones and calculators during math classes.

I’ve written about adults in their 40s who can’t grasp the concept of fractions. How can a nation be competitive with that kind of workforce?

We’ve had 10 years of the K-12 curriculum before the latest tweak. For the sake of the next generations, let’s hope the latest changes will work to address the learning weaknesses, which were aggravated during the COVID lockdowns.

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As for the subjects on values formation, including good manners and right conduct, such lessons were tough to impart in the previous administration, when the people were regularly subjected to presidential speeches teeming with profanities, sex jokes and insults directed at critics.

The new President is presidential, so teaching good manners should be easier. But students might still get confused with the appointment of a person more uncouth than Rodrigo Duterte, the disbarred Larry Gadon, as BBM’s antipoverty czar.

“Matatag” reportedly includes a peace component, promoting non-violent approaches. Perhaps an adult literacy version of this component can be given to certain members of the Philippine National Police, so that they don’t fatally shoot unarmed teenagers.

This vile habit of shooting first and asking questions later was surely carried over from the PNP abuses in the previous administration, encouraged by the father of the DepEd chief.

The Matatag curriculum is being rolled out gradually. Let’s hope it will address the learning gaps that keep widening.

Meanwhile, as part of values formation, teachers might want to give special focus on inculcating the concept of honesty. It might produce younger generations of Filipinos that see corruption as thievery of people’s money and poll fraud as thievery of the people’s will, which constitute unpatriotic acts.

But this is asking too much from the reworked basic education curriculum. At this point, getting 10-year-olds to read, in a language they are most comfortable with, and improving their comprehension will be good enough.