For parents who only want the best for their children, the sight of 45 pupils lumped into one classroom is not a pretty sight.
But such is the reality in most public schools today.
The perennial problem of lack of classrooms and teachers keeps hounding the educational system, leaving us trailing most of our neighboring countries.
The shortage of teachers in our public schools is not due to a national shortage of teachers. Rather, it is because of the lack of money to hire more teachers.
Enter the K plus 12 program.
This is a long-delayed improvement in the Philippine educational system that introduces two more years of schooling in the basic educational curriculum, patterned after the system used in the west.
Educators have been eyeing this system, and talking about its applicability to the Philippine educational curriculum for some time now, and finally, somebody had the guts to get it done.
As with any kind of change, there are kinks that need to be ironed out here and there.
Parents, for one, have complained of lack of classrooms and lack of teachers. But these problems should not be lumped with the K plus 12 program, as problems like this have been here for the past several years.
Rather, our eyes should focus on the effects of teaching the pupils in the vernacular, or their mother tongue, which is the most significant strategy of this new program.
Change does not come overnight. We are confident, however, that we will start seeing its positive effects, hopefully sooner than later.
