Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo wants to ease the kindergarten to Grade 3 pupils with overloaded subjects to enable them to concentrate on reading, mathematics as well as good manners and right conduct.
Romulo, House committee on basic education and culture chairperson, raised alarm over the country being the poorest among 79 countries as far as the students’ reading comprehension was concerned based on the results of the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Since August, educators had asked the Department of Education to lessen the number of subjects in kindergarten to grade 3 so that pupils could concentrate more on the most basic ones, he said.
“We need GMRC, mathematics and reading. Those are just basic (subjects). We need to focus more on these to ensure that pupils in grade 1 could be able to comprehend what they are reading,” he said.
The scores that the Philippines received in PISA 2018 are not far from the results of the National Achievement Test (NAT), an examination administered to grade 6 and grade 10 students to gauge their learning competencies, he said.
NAT results would show that there were many non-readers among the grade 6 and grade 10 students, he said.
Meanwhile, in the weekly radio program of Vice President Leni Robredo, her spokesperson Barry Gutierrez said “even if the results were not impressive, at least we came to know that there is a problem such as this. The challenge to us is, what must we do?”
Robredo was in Bicol for relief operations for those affected by typhoon “Tisoy.”
Gutierrez echoed the Vice President’s position that education is the key to success of the youth.
