Prescribed – Integrated – Creative

  "Beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love."

Louis Kahn

Americans are champions of local control.  Filipinos are champions of practicing it.  I have mourned with fellow teachers from Korea and China over the burden of their national curriculum, over their inability to sway from the textbook or step off pace from the directives of their national office.  The Philippines also have a national curriculum, but like their sense of privacy allows them to flow in and out of touch with each other without sacrificing a deeply integrated relationship, their state directive allows them to ebb and flow in and out of sync with the document as they operate independently yet stay in sync with each other.  The curriculum is loose and built of modules as opposed to chapters from a text.  It is also affectionate, loving, coming from national leaders who care deeply for the future of their children who also understand the incredible diversity represented in these islands and the needs of the communities that they serve.  The modules for each grade level come with prescribed content and teaching activities.  But every class is not the same.  Teachers adapt the modules integrating values education and critical thinking opportunities to create a meaningful local experience of the nationalized curriculum.

Crowded schools dictate that students stay in one class and teachers move.  Teachers work from departmental faculty rooms where desks line the walls and middle of the room.  Each room has a small eating area where teachers share lunch and interact daily – lunch duties being left to the janitors and security personnel– so teachers can refresh and interact.  If a teacher is absent, their classes are left teacherless.  Students sit quietly at their desk completing homework assignments or visiting quietly.  Time in classes is divided throughout the week, so they don’t necessarily meet for an hour every day, but rather English is 200 minutes a week and divided throughout the week.  Electives meet less than core courses.  Teachers have two prep periods a day and are paid according to their teaching loads.  The standard load is 24 units a week which is about 24 hours of classroom time a week.  If you teach more than 24 units, you are compensated.  I believe it is standard everywhere that teachers work beyond their contract hours.  Our host is the Vice Principal of her school and she often stays at school until 6 or even 8 in the evening even though the kids generally go home by 4. 

Private schools are integrated, meaning that they have preschool, kindergarten, elementary, jr high school and sr high school and college in one school.  This is especially valuable for vertical alignment.  Students that begin school in the same private school, maintain good grades and are able to afford the private school throughout are blessed with a very cohesive education.  Teachers address the new school year with confidence that their students have common educational experiences from the year before.  Interactions between the different grade levels are positive.  The college is slightly gated off from the elementary & secondary school.  It has its own cantina and library and wifi access.  The elementary and secondary classes are held on separate floors with the youngest being near the bottom and the oldest on the top floor.  They share a library, viewing room, computer lab, cantina and the like.  All levels take turns playing sports in the center of the complex.  Their gym and theater were destroyed in a fire last year, so all activities take place outside.  The older and younger students do not seem to interact either negatively or positively.  They pass each other comfortably and go about their business.   During the assembly older students move towards the elementary classrooms to help the younger students with songs.

Another aspect of the integration is the entwining of rich and poor.  Uniforms effectively mask social classes for me.  I cannot tell if a student is rich or poor except a few wealthy students wearing name brand sweatshirts and the like.  For the most part they look equally intelligent and blessed in their plaid skirts, pressed slacks and white dress shirts.  However, I learn that the “working students” (TAs) work in exchange for the cost of their tuition and that high performing students receive full scholarships as well.  San Agustin is especially generous with scholarships.  Our host often commented, “She is poor but very smart so we work it out so she can come here.”  It seems that if you are very smart and know how to work the private school system, you can obtain a quality private education.

Public schools are not integrated.  They have separate elementary and high schools.  As the whole nation is moving to a k-12 system at this time, they will create jr. and sr. high schools soon.  Public schools benefit from all schools following the national curriculum but excessively large classes (up to 60 on this island!) and limited resources also limit the teachers’ opportunities to teach creatively.  Public schools generally cover basic, core content subjects. One large public school in Bacolod offers technology electives.  Most schools do offer special science classes for “A” students to fuel the nation’s desire to be competitive internationally.  They have a special science high school like the Makati Science School that we visited in Manila. The island does not taut specialized vocational schools like we saw in Manila.  With the push for high school diplomas and completing university courses, the area experiences a similar situation as we experience in the states.  For example, they graduate many nurses, but nurses are not paid well and there aren’t as many jobs available as they have graduates.  So nursing graduates are able to make a better living working in call centers.  Interestingly, there are no programs at the high school or university level to train workers for the call center even though it is one of the primary employers for the area.  It is believed that the k-12 system will better facilitate vocational training and integrate both academics and vocational training within the schools so as to provide much needed skilled labor.  San Agustin will offer courses to prepare students to pass the national skills assessments, so they can leave high school with a certificate to work.  It’s not surprising that since we gave our educational system to the Filipinos that they struggle with similar issues as us.  The push for academic oriented careers has saturated their system almost as surely as it has saturated ours and left a deficit of technical workers so the demand for skilled labor is high here just like it is high in the US.

So all of us in the field of education move forward addressing similar problems.  Integrating students, curriculum, methodology and even teachers can help all of us solve the issues that plague education today in every nation.  As  LBJ once said,  "There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves."  Together is a concept we can learn from the Filipino.