During his second State of the Nation Address on July 24, 2023, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. highlighted the government’s ongoing efforts to refine the Philippine basic education system. He spoke of recalibrating the K to 12 curriculum to ensure its relevance, responsiveness, and alignment with international standards. The President further emphasized the need to strengthen the foundation of learning and stressed the importance of adaptability. Students, he noted, must become more resilient while the government works to tackle classroom and facility shortages. The focus, he underscored, should be on empowering the Filipino mind through education. There was, at that time, absolutely no suggestion to scrap K to 12.

Two years later, in mid-2025, the President has become more outspoken about some perceived shortcomings of the K to 12 curriculum, particularly regarding the employability of basic education graduates. He observed that after 10 years under K to 12, graduates still lacked a real advantage in securing jobs. He expressed openness to allowing Congress to decide whether to abolish or reform the program. He also flagged the need to work with the private sector to align training with employer needs, including offering short vocational courses to address the skills mismatch. In July 2025, his spokesperson clarified that the President is not outright against the K to 12 curriculum; he supports enhancing and improving it as long as it remains law.

As a long-time educator myself (I started teaching at 18 and am now 86), I must declare that those advocating for the repeal of the K to 12 law are making the proverbial mistake of “throwing the baby with the bathwater.” The persistent mismatch between the products of our basic education system and the actual capabilities and skills demanded by the labor market (whether public or private) cannot be attributed to the K to 12 curriculum itself. As stated in a Joint Statement by the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd), a broad coalition of business leaders, academics, and civil society representatives, there is strong reaffirmation of support for the K to 12 basic education program and the President’s call to improve its implementation. Thinking solely of the common good of Philippine society, PBEd members recognize that K to 12 is essential for preparing Filipino youth for employment, lifelong learning, and active citizenship.

The reference to at least three objectives of basic education—employment, lifelong learning, and active citizenship—makes it clear that the education every human being has a fundamental and constitutional right to obtain from society goes beyond merely preparing for a trade, occupation, or profession. The very word “education” comes from the Latin word “educare,” which means “to draw out.” Education, whether within the home, classroom, or workplace, is essentially “drawing out” from every human being all the talents, knowledge, and skills a person has the inherent potential to develop. We teachers have always been reminded that the educational process is not about pouring our knowledge into an empty vessel but, like a midwife, helping to draw out what is latent in a person. That is why the objectives of basic education should not just be to produce “economically useful workers” but, first and foremost, thoroughly human beings.

The so-called “useless” subjects such as literature, history, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and the physical and social sciences, which are part of the liberal arts curriculum incorporated into the various stages of basic education (from K to 12), are meant primarily to make pupils thoroughly human. That is why these subjects are sometimes referred to as the “Humanities.” The last two years of the K to 12 curriculum offer the final opportunity for those who will choose to be skilled technical workers (e.g., electricians, mechanics, plumbers, butchers, physical therapists, caregivers, etc.) to be exposed to these “humanizing subjects,” which are crucial for human development. Every person should be given an opportunity to cultivate critical thinking skills and effective communication. In fact, in some private universities (whether for-profit or not-for-profit), the senior year in high school is called “junior college.” Given the usual age of a typical pupil who starts Grade 1 at six years old when they reach their senior year (16 to 18), it is also pedagogically sound that students are exposed to the more intellectually demanding disciplines contained in the general education curriculum as they reach the age of maturity.

For high school graduates who choose more knowledge-based and intellectually demanding professions such as medicine, the physical sciences, social sciences, law, education, engineering, mathematics, and management, among others, the undergraduate curriculum should still include some general education or humanities subjects in the first two years. This has nothing to do with “duplication.” Those humanities subjects offered in the senior year of the K to 12 program were meant to build the foundations for lifelong learning, including for those who may begin their careers requiring more manual rather than intellectual skills. These technical workers, however, must still be given a minimum of general education in their last years of basic education so that, if they choose to do so, they can still use the ladderized system to become future engineers, medical doctors, scientists, etc. By removing the last two years in the K to 12 curriculum, we would actually be limiting their opportunities for upskilling, reskilling, and retooling.

Those who want to do away with the K to 12 curriculum argue that, since its introduction more than ten years ago, employers continue to discriminate against K to 12 graduates and always insist on a college degree. These critics are behind the times. Today, employers are wiser and no longer look solely at academic credentials. Time and again, officials of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Confederation of Employers insist that they are looking for skills among job applicants. A perfect example I can give is the animation sector of the BPO-IT industry. I heard from the owner of one of these enterprises, which uses Filipino creative skills in drawing animated characters, especially for the Japanese anime industry, that none of his 100 employees have a college degree. Increasingly, employers are abandoning their old practice of requiring a college degree as a minimum for employment because the jobs available in the past were not skills-specific. The skills needed by each employer were mostly developed in-house. A college degree was the most convenient way of finding out who was trainable and who was not, owing to the foundational knowledge acquired in a college curriculum, no matter how mediocre.

Since the Philippines increasingly needs more technical workers (as contrasted with knowledge workers), what should be modified in the K to 12 Curriculum is to orient more and more of those in the senior year towards the TESDA-oriented or technical education track. We should also motivate these graduates, through realistic promises of higher salaries than many college-degree holders, to enroll in TESDA-type schools. I can speak with a lot of authority about the very high wages of people with advanced skills in electro-mechanics, carpentry, culinary arts, and agro-technology because I have been involved in the establishment of such very successful tech-voc schools as the Dualtech Training Institute in Canlubang, Laguna; the Center for Technology and Enterprise (CITE) in Cebu; the MFTI in Ortigas; and the Dagatan Agritech School in Lipa, Batangas. Products of these schools earn incomes after graduation that are higher than those earned by the average college graduate.

To be continued.