College teachers and SHS

By Isagani Cruz (The Philippine Star), July 2, 2015

During the transition period when there will be fewer or no freshmen in college, college teachers who have master’s degrees will be eligible for Commission on Higher Education (CHED) scholarships to take up doctoral studies here or abroad.

College teachers who already have doctoral degrees can go for postdoctoral studies abroad or work as faculty interns in companies, in order to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

College teachers with only bachelor’s degrees can avail of the Department of Education (DepEd) Green Lane.

What is the Green Lane?

Section 8c of RA 10533 (the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013) provides that “faculty of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) be allowed to teach in their general education or subject specialties in the secondary education: Provided, That the faculty must be a holder of a relevant Bachelor’s degree, and must have satisfactorily served as a full-time HEI faculty.”

Section 12 reads: “To manage the initial implementation of the enhanced basic education program and mitigate the expected multi-year low enrolment turnout for HEIs and Technical Vocational Institutions (TVIs) starting School Year 2016-2017, the DepEd shall engage in partnerships with HEIs and TVIs for the utilization of the latter’s human and physical resources. Moreover, the DepEd, the CHED, the TESDA, the TVIs and the HEIs shall coordinate closely with one another to implement strategies that ensure the academic, physical, financial, and human resource capabilities of HEIs and TVIs to provide educational and training services for graduates of the enhanced basic education program to ensure that they are not adversely affected. The faculty of HEIs and TVIs allowed to teach students of secondary education under Section 8 hereof, shall be given priority in hiring for the duration of the transition period. For this purpose, the transition period shall be provided for in the implementing rules and regulations (IRR).”

Section 30.1 of the IRR repeats this obligation of DepEd to hire college teachers: “The faculty of HEIs and TVIs allowed to teach students of secondary education under Section 8 of the Act, shall be given priority in hiring for the duration of the transition period.”

Let us make it clear first that these provisions refer to teachers currently teaching full-time in college. These provisions are not primarily meant for teachers with graduate degrees. Those are provided for in the program I mentioned in last week’s column, namely, CHED’s project entitled “Scholarships for Graduate Studies.” These provisions are primarily meant for those with only undergraduate degrees.

The Green Lane is a program of DepEd to hire these college teachers with only undergraduate degrees. Here is the description of the Green Lane: “At least 30,000 new teachers and 6,000 new non-teaching staff are needed per year in 2016 and 2017 for DepEd’s Senior High School. To fill said vacancies, DepEd will be putting up a ‘Green Lane’ to prioritize and fast-track employment of possibly displaced HEI personnel. This includes matching them in terms of locality and finding comparable salaries for HEI faculty and staff.”

If you remember the figures given by CHED, 50% of the 13,000 potentially displaced college faculty today do not have graduate degrees. That means, at most, around 6,500 teachers (full-time and part-time), fewer than the 60,000 teachers DepEd needs (30,000 a year for two years).

Again, college teachers with graduate degrees should not worry that they will be “forced” to teach in high school. DepEd is not prioritizing them in its hiring of teachers for Senior High School. It is the college teachers without graduate degrees, who should not be teaching in college anyway according to the Supreme Court, who are being given a chance to earn a livelihood (note: with “comparable salaries”) in DepEd.

Having said that, I want nevertheless to recall the experience of Ludwig Wittgenstein. For six years after he had become known as “the greatest philosopher alive,” he taught elementary school in Trattenbach, Austria.

Here is an excerpt from an article in “Paris Review” (March 5, 2015) entitled “Wittgenstein, Schoolteacher”:

“Wittgenstein engaged his students in a sort of ‘project-based learning’ that wouldn’t be out of place in the best elementary classrooms today. They designed steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals; examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read literature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna, where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine. Just to get to the train required a twelve-mile hike through the mountainous forest around Trattenbach; on the return trip, the students made this hike after midnight. On the way, Wittgenstein would ask them the names they’d learned of the plants in the forest. In Vienna they would discuss the architectural styles of the buildings they visited and look for examples of the machines they had modeled. Another project grew into what was, remarkably, the only book Wittgenstein published in his lifetime besides the ‘Tractatus’: a spelling dictionary he developed with the help of his students, which briefly saw official use in Austrian schools.”

If you have a doctorate and feel that it is beneath you to teach in senior high school, think of Wittgenstein and be humbled. The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century taught children in elementary school.

(To be continued)