DepEd issues Implementing rules of Kindergarten Act
MANILA, Philippines - To ensure that the unique needs of diverse learners will be addressed; the Kindergarten Education General Curriculum will cater to the needs of pupils with special needs and disabilities and create a catch-up program for children under difficult circumstances.
Kindergarten education was institutionalized as part of basic education and was implemented partially in school year 2011-2012. It was made mandatory and compulsory for entrance to Grade 1.
The general kindergarten program is the 10-month program provided to children who are at least five years old in elementary schools using thematic and integrative curriculum to ensure the development of foundation skills among children to prepare them for Grade 1.
Republic Act (RA) 10157, otherwise known as “The Kindergarten Education Act,” provides that the curriculum is designed to cater to the needs of the learners with special needs or children who are gifted, those with disabilities, and other diverse learners by adopting services in addition to the standards provided, such as Head start Program for the Gifted, Early Intervention Program for Children with Disabilities, Early Intervention Program for Children with Disabilities, Kindergarten Madrasah Program (KMP), Indigenous People (IP) Education, and Catch-Up Program for Children under Especially Difficult Circumstances.
The Head start Program for the Gifted is a comprehensive program for the gifted and talented pupils in public elementary schools designed to address the educational, aesthetic, and social needs of children who manifest superior intelligence beyond their age.
The Early Intervention Program for Children with Disabilities is designed for children who are identified with special educational needs. The program provides services that will arrest further handicapping conditions of children with disabilities. This intervention could either be home-, school-, or community-based.
For Muslim pupils enrolled in public schools, the Kindergarten Madrasah Program (KMP) requires providing the children with Arabic Language and Islamic Values Education (ALIVE) classes, as well as those in private madaris using the Standard Madrasah Curriculum prescribed by the Department of Education.
The Indigenous Peoples Education, on the other hand, ensures the preservation, recognition, promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous people, their ancestral domain, cultural identity and heritage. It incorporates special needs, histories, identities, languages, indigenous knowledge, systems and practices, and other aspects of their culture, as well as their social, economic, and cultural priorities and aspirations.
The Catch-up Program for Children under Especially Difficult Circumstances is for children six years old and above under especially difficult circumstances, such as, but not limited to, chronic illness, displaced children due to armed conflict, urban resettlement, disasters and child labor practice, who are not able to finish the General Kindergarten Program.

The implementing rules and regulations of RA 10157 also provide that the mother tongue of the learners shall be the primary medium of instruction for teaching and learning in the kindergarten level in public schools. However, exceptions shall be made when the pupils in the kindergarten classroom have a different mother tongue or when the teacher does not speak the mother tongue of the pupils.
KEY ISSUES IN PHILIPPINE EDUCATION

Literacy rate in the Philippines has improved a lot over the last few years- from 72 percent in 1960 to 94 percent in 1990. This is attributed to the increase in both the number of schools built and the level of enrollment in these schools.The number of schools grew rapidly in all three levels - elementary, secondary, and tertiary. From the mid-1960s up to the early 1990, there was an increase of 58 percent in the elementary schools and 362 percent in the tertiary schools. For the same period, enrollment in all three levels also rose by 120 percent. More than 90 percent of the elementary schools and 60 percent of the secondary schools are publicly owned. However, only 28 percent of the tertiary schools are publicly owned.A big percentage of tertiary-level students enroll in and finish commerce and business management courses. Table 1 shows the distribution of courses taken, based on School Year 1990-1991. Note that the difference between the number of enrollees in the commerce and business courses and in the engineering and technology courses may be small - 29.2 percent for commerce and business and 20.3 percent for engineering and technology. However, the gap widens in terms of the number of graduates for the said courses. TABLE 1: TERTIARY ENROLLMENT AND GRADUATION BY FIELD OF STUDY. SY 1990-1991 | FIELD OF STUDY | ENROLLMENT | GRADUATION | | No. | % | No. | % | Arts and Sciences | 196,711 | 14.6 | 29,961 | 13.6 | Teacher Training & Education | 242,828 | 18.0 | 34,279 | 15.5 | Engineering & Technology | 273,408 | 20.3 | 32,402 | 14.7 | Medical and Health - related Programs | 176,252 | 13.1 | 34,868 | 15.8 | Commerce/Business Management | 392,958 | 29.2 | 79,827 | 36.1 | Agriculture, Forestry, Fishery, and Veterinary Medicine | 43,458 | 3.2 | 7,390 | 3.3 | Law | 20,405 | 1.5 | 2,111 | 1.0 | Religion / Theology | 1,695 | 0.1 | 209 | 0.1 | TOTAL | 1,347,715 | 100.0 | 221,047 | 100.0 |
On gender distribution, female students have very high representation in all three levels. At the elementary level, male and female students are almost equally represented. But female enrollment exceeds that of the male at the secondary and tertiary levels . Also, boys have higher rates of failures, dropouts, and repetition in both elementary and secondary levels.Aside from the numbers presented above, which are impressive, there is also a need to look closely and resolve the following important issues: 1) quality of education 2) affordability of education 3) goverment budget for education; and 4) education mismatch. Quality - There was a decline in the quality of the Philippine education, especially at the elementary and secondary levels. For example, the results of standard tests conducted among elementary and high school students, as well as in the National College of Entrance Examination for college students, were way below the target mean score.Affordability - There is also a big disparity in educational achievements across social groups. For example, the socioeconomically disadvantaged students have higher dropout rates, especially in the elementary level. And most of the freshmen students at the tertiary level come from relatively well-off families.Budget - The Philippine Constitution has mandated the government to allocate the highest proportion of its budget to education. However, the Philippines still has one of the lowest budget allocations to education among the ASEAN countries.Mismatch - There is a large proportion of "mismatch" between training and actual jobs. This is the major problem at the tertiary level and it is also the cause of the existence of a large group of educated unemployed or underemployed.The following are some of the reforms proposed:Upgrade the teachers' salary scale. Teachers have been underpaid; thus there is very little incentive for most of them to take up advanced trainings.Amend the current system of budgeting for education across regions, which is based on participation rates and units costs. This clearly favors the more developed regions. There is a need to provide more allocation to lagging regions to narrow the disparity across regions.Stop the current practice of subsidizing state universities and colleges to enhance access. This may not be the best way to promote equity. An expanded scholarship program, giving more focus and priority to the poor, maybe more equitable.Get all the leaders in business and industry to become actively involved in higher education; this is aimed at addressing the mismatch problem. In addition, carry out a selective admission policy, i.e., installing mechanisms to reduce enrollment in oversubscribed courses and promoting enrollment in undersubscribed ones.Develop a rationalized apprenticeship program with heavy inputs from the private sector. Furthermore, transfer the control of technical training to industry groups which are more attuned to the needs of business and industryThe new challenge of the mother tongues: the future of Philippine postcolonial language politics
Abstract
For much of postcolonial language politics around the world, the fight has largely been between a foreign language and (a) dominant local language(s). This is true in the Philippines where the debates have focused on English and Filipino, the Tagalog-based national language. In recent years, however, the mother tongues have posed a challenge to the ideological structure of the debates. Although local languages have long been acknowledged as positively contributing to the enhancement of learning in school, they have been co-opted mostly as a nationalist argument against English, American (neo)colonialism and imperialist globalization. The current initiatives to establish mother tongue-based education reconfigure the terms of engagement in Philippine postcolonial language politics: it must account for the fact that the mother tongues could be the rightful media of instruction. In the process, it must tease out issues concerning the decoupling of Filipino as the national language and Filipino as a/the medium of instruction, and deal with the politics of inclusion and exclusion in “bilingual” and
“multilingual’” education. Nevertheless, this paper ends with a general critique of language debates in the country, arguing that “content” has been sidelined in much of the discussion. The future of postcolonial language politics in the Philippines should not be about language per se, but about how the entanglements of language with the larger
(neo)colonial infrastructures of education where medium, substance and structures are needed to advance the nationalist imagining of the multilingual nation.INTRODUCTION
If one is to take stock of work done in postcolonial language politics around the world (e.g., debates, policy-making practices, research), the problem has been expressed essentially in terms of the tension between imperialist languages and local languages More often than not, the question has either been how to de-center the colonial/imperial languages from social life or how to slowly (re)introduce the mother tongues into the centers of power in society such as political governance and the educational system.
In this paper, the role of mother tongues in Philippine postcolonial language politics will be explored. Specifically, it will trace the reconfiguring of language politics in the country in recent years through an investigation of a range of mother tongue initiatives and discourses from national level policy debates to grassroots projects around the country. The paper will show that, while the argument for mother tongues in education and social development is definitely not new, recent multi-sectoral, multi-level work in the area has opened up possibilities of a different discursive configuration of language politics in the country. These are the displacement of English and
Filipino as media of instruction, the decoupling of Filipino as national language and as medium of instruction, and the re-mapping of the “nation” through the supposedly more inclusive mother tongues. The paper, however, also argues that postcolonial language politics in the Philippines should not be about language per se, but about the entanglements of language with the larger
(neo)colonial infrastructures of education where medium, substance and structures are needed to advance the nationalist imagining of the multilingual nation.MOTHER TONGUE INSTRUCTION AROUND THE WORLD
The literature on the use of the mother tongues or the first languages of learners has been overwhelmingly positive. The Global Monitoring Report of UNESCO (Education for All) summarizes the rich field thus far:
The choice of the language of instruction used in school is of utmost importance.
Initial instruction in the learner’s first language improves learning outcomes and reduces subsequent grade repetition and dropout rates. (17)
However, this seemingly unproblematic fact about mother tongues becomes a highly politicized argument if it is located in specific sociopolitical contexts. Indeed, the role of mother tongues in society and education depends on whose society and education we are talking about.
Benson, for example, notes that in many ex-British colonies mother tongue schooling has been a historical by-product of separate and unequal development, for example the institutionalization of Bantu education during the apartheid era of South Africa, although pedagogical strategies emerging from this discriminatory practice have become potential agents of change towards equitable education. Similarly, mother tongues have served as compensatory tools to reverse the trend of illiteracy and high school dropout rates in many marginalized communities and countries around the world, for example in Guatemala where only less than half of its rural Maya language speaking population is enrolled in school and further half drops out after first grade.
Moreover, still according to Benson, mother tongues have also served as representations of new political ideologies of many societies around the world, for example the explicit political valuing of pluralism in the constitutions of Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia; while clearly educational development objectives drive the institutionalization of mother tongue instruction such as the ones used in Mozambique, Nigeria, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.
The point here is that, while mother tongue instruction has proved to be pedagogically sound, its valuing differs across communities and societies. The many layers of ideology and politics which undergird it reveal, in particular, a specific politics of language and education and, in general, a sociopolitical landscape characterized by tension between inclusionary and exclusionary policies.
Mother tongue instruction does not and cannot happen in a vacuum; even as it argues for its superiority over other modes of instruction, it is enmeshed in many other social issues. Unpacking these issues surrounding mother tongue instruction can reveal rich information about postcolonial language politics in many societies today.Perhaps then even a more fundamental question should be this: do we need a national language?
There are, however, more questions that need to be asked, the most critical of which is perhaps the issue of content in Philippine education. If we scrutinize the network of issues concerning bilingual and multilingual education in the country, much discussion revolves around the (re)placement and (dis)placement of languages in schools as part of the country’s struggle with its (neo)colonial legacies. This does not mean that the role of content has not been part of the discussion; in the early 1960s and 1970s, the “mis-education” of the Filipino people (R. Constantino) was at the core of the nationalist argument against English and, in a more general sense, against the endemic colonial trappings of Philippine society. The bilingual education policy of 1974 thus became the first formal education platform to accommodate a local language, P/Filipino, as a medium of instruction, together with English, as a political solution to the enduring problem of
(neo)colonialism in the country. Yet, the same bilingual education infrastructure was used by the
Marcos dictatorship to consolidate its power through the propagation of its myths and through the institutionalization of neoliberal “manpower” programs put in place by its acquiescence to dictates of US-led global economic institutions such as the World Bank (Bello, Kinley, and Elinson;
Schirmer and Shalom).
Similarly, at the same time when bilingual education was re-affirmed and Filipino was installed as the national language in the post-Marcos 1987 Constitution, Philippine education continued to be plagued by imperialist content. In a pioneering research, Canieso-Doronilla
(The Limits of Education Change 74) found among pupil-subjects of her study an absence of ethnocentric affiliation with Filipino nationality, pride of country, support of nationalism before internationalism/globalism, and commitment to decolonization and national self-reliance. Canieso-
Doronilla concludes that it “is fair to say that the young respondents have as yet no conception of what it means to be a Filipino, identifying instead with the characteristics and interests of other nationalities, particularly American” (74) (see also Mulder; L. Constantino). In short, postcolonial language politics must take into greater consideration the role of content in Philippine education.CONCLUSION
As late as 2003 during which former President Gloria Arroyo issued a memorandum that would put English back as the “sole” medium of instruction in the country, the issues raised did not substantially advance the ideological structure of the debates. Those in favor of English as the main language of instruction justified it on grounds that English is the language of globalization, social mobility and global competitiveness; those against it (thus in favor of the “bilingual” status quo) argued that Filipino, the mother tongue and the national language, would be more effective in facilitating learning among pupils and in fostering national unity and a nationalist consciousness.
The charge against Filipino came from “non-Tagalog” critics who claimed that Filipino is divisive and is indicative of Tagalog imperialism. The ideological genealogies of these arguments can be traced back to the linguistic battles of the 1930s, early 1970s, and mid 1980s during which questions about national language and medium of instruction framed the debates. In all of these, the “mother tongue” argument was central to many positions.
The recent challenge of the mother tongues, however, substantially reconfigures the terms of engagement in postcolonial language politics. Who can imagine the nation and how can this be done through bilingual (English and Filipino, the national language) or multilingual education (MLE)?
Crucially, it is also important not to forget the polemics of content vis-à-vis the role of language in the reconfiguration of such politics. It should likewise account for what can be imagined in the unrelenting postcolonial project of (re)making the Philippine nation. The medium and substance of nationalism should animate the future of postcolonial language politics in the country..References: | |
Commissioned For EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005.” UNESCO. 14 Nov. 2010
<http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001466/146632e.pdf>
Basic Education and
Culture, Committee on Higher and Technical Education, and House of Representatives.” SIL Philippines
< http://www.sil.org/asia/philippines/lit/2008-02-27_Report_to_Congress-Lu....