School Year Starts

School year 2014-2015 has officially started for the kids. Issa is in the fifth grade and is the only one left at Doane Baptist Academy (DBA) after her kuya graduated a few months back. Kitkat and Paolo are both at Doane Christian Academy Foundation (DCAF), Kitkat is graduating high school this year, while Paolo is just starting. Both Paolo and Issa will be taking six years in high school after the K-12 Education system was implemented back in 2011. 

This change in the education system was due to the increasing number of non-hiring of Filipinos in the international job marketplace because potential employers deem Filipinos lacking in education units given that Filipinos only have four years of high school education, while the rest of the world has 6 (grades 7-12). And in order to be more competitive in the said marketplace, the K-12 program was implemented to the dismay of many. Primarily because quality education is quite expensive and an extra two years in school is two years of lost earning potential for striving families.

Some say we've been doing okay with the old system and an extra two year stretch covering the same curricula was unnecessary. Government should not be conditioning it's people for jobs abroad, and instead should focus more on the citizen's leaning towards entrepreneurship. The education system should encourage students to some day take up a business and become job makers in the future, instead of becoming job seekers abroad the moment they are handed their diplomas.

But what can we do? This is the path our elected officials decided on. All we can really do is pray that their decisions will reflect significant improvements to the quality of jobs this change has originally aimed for... pray that God sustains parents with their desire to get their children through school... and pray that students make full use of the "extra" education they are required to take.