My brother graduated in school last school year, they were the first batch who took up Grade 11, which we never had. Their batch will be the first batch to have a K12 education as I said before. My batch, which just finished high school, had a K10 education.

There are some pros to having an additional 2 years, such as using the extra years for vocational courses, this would mean that right after high school, they shouldn’t have a problem looking for a job to get some extra money.  Or they could use it to get a jump on college education, so that when the students go to college, they will immediately learn about their course and not have to learn the basics (math, science, I.T., etc.) which makes them save time and money. One problem with the latter is that if someone like me, who stopped school for a couple years, might not learn those basic subjects.

In my opinion, for the Philippines, the implementation of K12 could either be good or bad. If they implement it in a way where all they’re doing is teaching the basics in the first year then adding to that each year after, it would be a waste because they could just teach that to them and move on to a new lesson (like algebra in the first year then geometry in the second) so that it would be more efficient.The way I see that people can really benefit from the extra years is to use it for individualized learning, by taking the grades of the students from their 4 years, they can assign them to different classes which they had trouble in the first 4 years. Of course they should still take up those classes they were fine in, but just to remain constant. I think this might be highly unlikely because of the amount of resources needed to make that work. In case the latter isn’t the way they go, the next best thing they could do is let students take up vocational courses, and through some rumors, I’ve heard that this might be the path they take, but since it was merely rumors, take it with a grain of salt.

By: Emmanuel Quiroz