Senate hearing tackles values education bill

MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian expressed on Tuesday concern for the lack of classroom time allotted for teaching values education and a shortage of certified teachers specializing in the subject.

“We have seen in our hearing that values education has been diluted. So we want to make it whole and strengthened,” Gatchalian, speaking partly in Filipino, told reporters on Tuesday.

He was referring to the hearing on Senate Bill No. 310 that the Senate basic education committee had just conducted.

The bill seeks to institutionalize the teaching of Good Manners and Right Conduct (GMRC), or values education, in elementary and high school.

“What we want now is to give emphasis on values education because this will teach Filipino youth good manners,” Gatchalian said.

According to the bill, GMRC was removed as a regular subject and was integrated with other subjects, including Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao (ESP) and Araling Panlipunan under the new K-to-12 program.

During the hearing, professors from the Philippine Normal University (PNU) underscored the “clamor” of teachers over the amount of time currently allotted for teaching values education.

“Based on our experience as a teacher training institution and as a practitioner in values education for so many years, this subject is one of the subjects which has been neglected,” Dr. Wilma Reyes of PNU told the Senate panel.

“We are saddened by the fact of this neglect and the problems that we encounter in terms of its implementation,” she added.

According to Mark Anthony Bercando, a specialist in the Supervising Education Program of the Department of Education’s (DepEd), ESP would only be taught for 30 minutes daily in elementary and only two hours weekly in high school.

“Currently, the challenge for us is that the 30 minutes for elementary is not enough to really teach the subject so that we can see whether the competencies or the values have been instilled to our learners,” Bercando said.

On hearing this, Sen. Joel Villanueva said: “It’s just a concern when we hear about the present system that we are implementing.”

According to Bercando, about 70 to 90 percent of those who teach values education are not certified values education teachers.

“It will help a lot if we would have the right qualifications or academic preparations for our teachers,” he said. “There’s only a few of us values ed majors. There are only a few of us who are are licensed values education teachers in the country.”

Reyes expressed the same concern.

“Teachers that are underperforming in other subjects are the ones assigned to teach values education, hoping that they could be reformed there,” she said. “Therefore,  we who are really practitioners and working in the field of values education are hurt by this kind of feedback, like: How can the implementation of this subject truly improve if this is our reality.”

Gatchalian said that the insights shared during the hearing showed a clear need to institutionalize the teaching of GMRC.

“We need to bring back values education — which includes good morals and right conduct—because we’ve seen in the last 49 years, there have been different methods of teaching values education and now only 30 minutes are allotted in elementary and two hours in high school,” he said.

“So it’s important that we give values education emphasis because only traditional subjects like math, science, English are given emphasis,” he added.

Gatchalian gave the resource persons until Nov. 7 to submit their position paper on the bill, which he noted could make values education the first legislated subject in the country.

“Let’s make it as detailed as possible, because once we legislate this subject, there’s no turning. We need to make sure that everything we want to put in there should be included in the bill,” he said.

/atm