Better or more?

DepEd has realized that “the congested curriculum partly explains the present state of education.” Twelve years of content are crammed into ten years. Other countries teach in 12 or more years what we are forced to teach in only 10 years. Students do not have time to understand what they are learning, but are forced simply to memorize facts at breakneck speed. As a result, we always score dismally in international tests in mathematics and science.

Opponents of the plan, on the other hand, argue that quantity does not mean quality. As one editorial writer put it, we need better education, not more education. What is wrong with the present curriculum, these critics say, is not that it is congested but that it is misguided. As far as the curriculum is concerned, DepEd should fix the current subjects instead of adding new ones.

In a debate, one takes extreme positions, but in real life, nothing is completely white nor completely black. The truth lies somewhere in between.

To correlate “worse or better” to “less or more” is simply not to know English. These two pairs of words are apples or oranges, or to localize the idiom, bananas and papayas.

Let me take a simple example taken from our national passion. If you put LeBron James and Kobe Bryant (or alternatively, James Yap and Asi Taulava) playing as one team (yes, just two of them) and five of our high school basketball players on the other team, I can bet you Manny Pacquiao’s tax payments that the dynamic duo will outscore the younger team by dozens of points. On the other hand, if you let two of our best high school players play five professional American or Filipino players, I can bet you the entire bank accounts of everybody in the BIR’s list of top taxpayers that these two, no matter how talented, will not outscore the professionals.

In other words, quantity has nothing to do with quality. More can be worse or better, just as less or few can be worse or better.

For the sake of those that hate basketball, let me take an even simpler example. Give me two pieces of bread, one of which is freshly baked, the other a week old. The one freshly baked can be very small, but it will definitely be better than the other one, no matter how big that other one is. On the other hand, I would love to have a bigger piece of the one freshly-baked, rather than a smaller piece of the stale one. Again, quantity is independent of quality.

Ten years of bad education are better than 12 years of bad education, but worse than 10 or 12 years of good education. Twelve years of good education are better than ten years of good education and better than 10 or 12 years of bad education. If that confuses you, do not despair, because it confused the editorial writer, who is supposed to be more intelligent than newspaper readers.

In fairness (as we Filipinos say), DepEd has not been given enough time to explain properly what it means by “congested curriculum.” A curriculum is not something that you expand like a rubber band that can hold 12 or 12 sheets of paper. Take an example from 3rd year High School or Grade 9. You should not teach Rizal’s Noli to both Grades 9 and 10 just because you want to decongest the curriculum. Instead, you might decide to have Grade 11 students read the whole novel rather than just a summary of it (which is what usually happens today).

What DepEd is doing right now is redesigning the curriculum from Kindergarten to Grade 12. That means doing away with the some subjects altogether, recasting other subjects, and adding new ones. A simple example has to do with reading. Before Noynoy became president, DepEd wanted to make every child a reader by Grade 3. Noynoy promised to make every child a reader by Grade 1. This means that lessons meant for Grade 3 now have to be given in Grade 1, and Grade 2 will have to change its entire reading curriculum, since every pupil will already know how to read.

Tomorrow, at FUSE, I am hosting the Second Curriculum Summit, with participants from DepEd, CHED, TESDA, DSWD, ECCDC, other government agencies, public and private schools, and business organizations. The Summit hopes to come up with a grid that will map the curriculum from pre-school to graduate school. Quality will be the order of the day, not quantity. (To be continued)

TEACHING TIP OF THE WEEK. The teaching training program of Waseda University in Tokyo was adopted by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. This is the account by Kazuyuki Sakatsume: “In this program, our philosophy was the following: ‘Training for teachers should be on a par, or better than, training for doctors.’ Moreover, we set as our goal the cultivation of highly expert teachers who would be able to make an educational ‘diagnosis’ of (understand) a child, to formulate a ‘prescription’ (teaching plan) based on sound premises, and to implement concrete and effective ‘treatment’ (coaching or instruction).”