According to the Management Association of the Philippines, keeping students in schools is becoming a major challenge in an age when employment is transforming from traditional to digital.
It urged the country to prioritize the easing of the current education crisis, emphasizing the need to transform the country’s education system to allow it to better adapt to a changed workplace in a technology-driven world.
MAP president Benedicta Du-Baladad said in a recent statement that time has come for a public-private partnership in education, emphasizing that one of education’s primary reasons for being is to ensure that its graduates are adequately prepared for gainful employment or for enterprise building.
“As the biggest ‘consumers’ of these graduates, we are all too willing to do our share in preparing them to be productive and competitive, or do business with them in the future. This collaboration is indispensable in creating a workforce that is skilled and ready to actively engage. That means transforming the Philippine education system so that I can adapt to a changed workplace in a technology-driven world,” she said.
“It is imperative that the educators tackle the reforms and be unafraid of disrupting their traditional systems so that the educational system can continue to be a bastion of progress and development,” she added.
Keeping students in school is becoming a major challenge, in an age when employment is transforming from traditional to digital. It noted that the youth are increasingly enamored with social media and have discovered many ways to monetize their experiences by sharing them online, according to the MAP.
It also pointed out that even in pre-pandemic days, Filipino students were already lagging far behind in reading, mathematics and science, as quantified by the 2018 results of the OECD Program for International Student Assessment. To make matters worse, education has worsened during the pandemic due to the lockdowns and the shift to online modalities of learning, which led to the lack of supervision by teachers, and has negatively impacted the quality of education and graduates produced by educational institutions.
She added that the vision of K-12 producing students that are employment ready, based on specialized skills that were supposed to be learned in grades 11 and 12, is far from being realized and graduates of the program are not getting better jobs, but end up taking elementary jobs that do not pay well.
Another harsh critique of the country’s educational system will certainly not be appreciated by most government officials, particularly from the Department of Education, but the truth of the matter is that it has been needing serious reforms and innovation for quite a while now. While the shift to K-12 was a well-meaning start, not enough has been done to make it better. One could even say that failure might even be an option.
Filipinos deserve an education system that produce better results than it currently does right now.*
