Flexible curriculum

The Department of Education (DepEd) does not believe that “one size fits all.” If you read the curriculum guides on its website, as well as the DepEd orders relevant to the curriculum, you will see that the government has taken a lot of pains to allow individual public and private schools to tailor their curriculum according to the needs of their students and communities.

RA 10533 itself, the “Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013,” mandates it. Section 5h of the law, which deals with curriculum development, explicitly states that the curriculum “shall be flexible enough to enable and allow schools to localize, indigenize and enhance the same based on their respective educational and social contexts. The production and development of locally produced teaching materials shall be encouraged and approval of these materials shall devolve to the regional and division education units.”

Look first at the second sentence of that provision. In the past, teaching materials (textbooks, modules, supplementary materials) were usually approved by the Central Office of DepEd. That can no longer be done. The law states that teaching materials are now going to be approved by the regional and division education units, not by the Central Office.

That small bureaucratic or organizational change ensures that teaching materials will not be all the same throughout the country. There will not be a single textbook, module, or supplementary material that will be prescribed for use in all schools. One size will not fit all.

The first sentence in the provision, however, is more important. It allows schools “to localize, indigenize and enhance” the curriculum. There is no way that DepEd’s Central Office can monitor the curriculum in more than 45,000 public schools and 12,000 private schools offering Kindergarten to Grade 12. When more than 2,000 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) start offering Senior High Schools in 2016, it will make the task of monitoring impossible.

To insist that these schools follow one rigid curriculum would violate the law, and DepEd is not about to do that. Since there should be a balance between a rigid curriculum and a free-for-all curriculum, however, DepEd has wisely placed this provision on its website in its answer to the frequently asked question (FAQ) about flexibility:

“Private schools may be allowed to go over and above the standards for the specific SHS track or strand. In case applicants plan to offer other specialized programs to cater to community and industry requirements, the applicant may propose new strands for a specific SHS track provided that they present other necessary SHS provisions to ensure readiness of their intended SHS.”

Let us make that clearer through an example. Suppose there is a high school where most of the graduates eventually join the maritime industry. (There are quite a few of these, actually.) There is no particular track or strand that prepares 18-year-olds to work in a ship. The school should then prepare a curriculum that allows their SHS graduates to work immediately in a ship or, if they want to earn higher wages, to go to a college that offers Maritime Engineering. That will mean (just to take a silly but obvious example) several hours learning how to swim.

The current SHS curriculum requires at least 2,480 hours of subjects, 1,200 hours of which have to be consumed inside a classroom doing Core Subjects. The Track subjects (which are subjects meant to prepare the student for employment or for entrance into a particular college major) are of two kinds: Applied Track Subjects (which will take 560 hours) and Specialized Subjects (which will take 720 hours).

Clearly, in our silly example, students cannot learn how to swim by staying inside a classroom (even assuming that the Core Subject called “Physical Education and Health” has them going outside the classroom). The students need many hours inside a swimming pool (or a beach, if there is one near the school). This logically means that we need to subtract a certain number of hours from the Applied Track Subjects and the Specialized Subjects.

DepEd has thought of an innovative way to deal with this problem. In its current presentations on the curriculum it has included a slide entitled “Curriculum Flexibilities.” DepEd has recommended that schools which need to “localize, indigenize and enhance” the curriculum may substitute subjects for two of the Core Subjects and three of the Specialized Subjects. At 80 hours per subject, this means that a school catering to potential mariners will have 5 times 80 hours or a total of 400 hours of subjects of their own making.

Not only that. If 400 hours are not enough (and potential mariners need to know not only how to swim but all the various other things that have to do with working on ships), then the school can propose a completely new set of Applied Track and Specialized Subjects.

Of course, the school cannot do away with the Core Subjects (even if two of them can be replaced), because the students may change their minds and decide to go to college after SHS instead of working immediately on board a ship. (To be continued) –Isagani Cruz (The Philippine Star)