Education for all

MANILA, Philippines – Education for all. That is EFA, and with its success, the Education Department is hoping that by 2015 it would entrench the department’s crowning enterprise: The Alternative Learning System (ALS).

ALS is a reform program of the Department of Education that provides “viable alternative to the existing formal education instructions, encompassing both non-formal and informal sources of knowledge and skills.”

It may appear surprising but sources claim some 80 percent of a person’s knowledge is acquired from informal source, and that a person’s own experience is a mostly no-nonsense and down-to-earth information sources.

Which is why experience and information from outside channels are called informal sources of knowledge.

According to DepEd Secretary Br. Armin Luistro, the Alternative Learning System is meant to address the learning needs of the marginalized groups of the country’s population, particularly those they call underserved people, the deprived, as well as out-of-school young people.

The out-of-school youths referred to are the young men and women aged 16-21 who have stopped schooling, not working, and are willing to learn the skills needed to make them useful members of society through “social, spiritual, and emotional progress towards self-sufficiency and become productive citizens of the community.”

The process is meant to address attitudes towards work, aptitude, and “to enhance readiness towards employment, training needs, and skills deficiencies of out-of-school youths.”

The ultimate purpose is to help the youth of the land in building self-confidence towards employment for the purpose, ideally, of pursuing formal education and goal development. –HERN. P. ZENAROSA, Manila BUlletin