Next year will mark two important events in the life of this country. We shall elect another president come May 9, 2016—together with local government officials—and a month or so later, the first batch of Grade 11 students will inaugurate the mandatory Senior High School (SHS) program nationwide.
Both events will have a tremendous bearing on the future of this country: one in the trajectory of its political and economic life and the other in its educational system.
On the first, it will be everyone’s guess who will eventually become president. But on the second, there is no space for guesswork as to how Grade 11 will proceed.
While one cannot say for certain that the Department of Education is 100 percent sure of the country’s readiness to usher in the Senior High School program, one can judge by looking at the memoranda issued by Secretary Luistro that DepEd is hell-bent on ensuring a smooth transition of the program.
One of the most important issues addressed by DepEd is the final shape and form of the SHS curricula. If one googles its website, one will certainly find a slew of subjects that will be offered (which I already mentioned in a previous column). Comes now the need for textbooks to go with the teaching–learning process.
At the University of San Carlos, nearly a hundred of its tertiary-level faculty members have been quietly undergoing training-workshops and follow-up meetings following their signing of contracts with the university administration to produce about 28 SHS textbooks based on the guidelines approved by the Department of Education.
Why are college teachers doing the writing for high schools, you might ask. The most obvious answer for the uninformed is that the SHS program almost mimics some of the courses that are offered as general education subjects in colleges. I say “almost mimics” because the teaching strategies, the presentation of the subject content and even the subject outlines and topics are nearly like those considered “service courses” in college freshmen and sophomore years. In brief, these courses have “slid” down to SHS and will no longer be offered as basic courses in college, inasmuch as for the rest of the world, all basic courses ought to be taken in high school.
However, there are qualitative differences, which explains the training-workshops and meetings that have been conducted with experts from the USC School of Education to tailor-fit the textbooks to the level of competencies required by the DepEd.
Today is the deadline for the submission of those draft manuscripts covering the 28 textbooks that the USC Press is expected to send out for independent peer review in January, so that by April, the corrected and final versions will be printed in time for the opening of classes in June, assuming classes will open at that time and not in August. USC will hopefully be using totally new textbooks, unlike those that are rumored to be produced by big textbook publishing houses that are nothing but compilations of existing college textbooks pulled together and bound with new covers to look like newly written texts for the new SHS program. Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
And so as the year closes, I wish all the 100 or so textbook authors all the best even as I pray that the country will see a better year than this politically fractious one we are about to close.
Let us therefore usher in the Year of the Fire Monkey pregnant with hope.
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