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Educated but unemployable

After a Commission on Human Rights study showed that new graduates were having a hard time finding work because of their lack of “soft skills” as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers are now calling for a review of the K-12 program, the implementation of educational reforms, and the creation of more jobs by government agencies.

Based on findings of the CHR report, new graduates were having a hard time getting hired as many of them lacked soft skills related to empathy, creativity, resilience and communication, as well as practical job skills best honed through face-to-face classes.

“Ten years after it was implemented, we believe the K-12 curriculum needs an honest-to-goodness review to determine the enhancements needed to make it more responsive and relevant to the needs of our students,” Sen. Grace Poe said in an interview with the Inquirer.

Along with Senators Jinggoy Estrada, Juan Edgardo Angara, and Risa Hontiveros, Poe pointed out that problems besetting the country’s education sector had existed for decades, even before the pandemic.

Senator Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel agreed, saying there should be an assessment of the current curriculum for basic and tertiary education.

Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva, a longtime advocate of technical and vocational education, said government agencies should work together to create additional jobs in various sectors. “We have to assist agri-fishing, manufacturing, and other sectors to create new and sustainable jobs, address issues on school-to-work transition and ensure industry-relevant skills and core skills,” he said.

Angara, on the other hand, said that appropriate state agencies should craft better programs not just in teaching students soft skills, but also in addressing other concerns, such as poor reading comprehension.

Hontiveros said the ongoing Second Congressional Commission on Education must be able to come up with a “game-changing strategy” in solving the education sector’s “wicked problem.” “The last thing we need is an employment crisis on top of an education crisis,” she noted.

Rep. Joey Salceda observed that the CHR report is consistent with the findings of other global studies showing that learning suffered as students were forced to study in isolation.

The country’s education sector was never among its strengths, and the shift to the K-12 program was supposed to be among the long term strategies to address that particularly damning weakness that threatens to doom a country’s competitiveness. The challenges and setbacks posed by the pandemic only exposed its inadequacies further, and the CHR report is a reflection of the depth of the damage that needs to be undone by the current crop of officials responsible for the education and employment of the country’s youth.

This is a deep-seated problem that cannot be solved by posturing, slogans, or even the return of ROTC. We can only hope that the people responsible are already aware of the issue and have been working on a solution even before the report confirmed our fears.*

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