Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Philippine K+12 Education Reform: A Reflective Essay

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The implementation of the K+12 Curriculum in the Philippines has caused several reactions from various education stakeholders in the country. While there was a remarkable number of negative criticisms on the readiness of the country for the implementation of this "ambitious" paradigm in the basic education level, one cannot deny the fact that the policy has a number of good intentions especially on the retooling of our education system so that its quality will be at par with our other counterparts in the ASEAN region and the world. I consider this reform a remarkable milestone that the government has risked for just to ensure that the quality of graduates that we will be able to produce will be globally competitive. However, one could hardly deny the fact that the implementation was not a smooth sailing – it was marred with various challenges in the areas of curriculum implementation, facilities development, economic concerns among parents, faculty readiness among others. I was in the forefront of the implementation of the reform as pioneering faculty member in the Senior High School and current middle level school administrator who has been tasked to ensure that the program will continue to ensure the quality of learning in response to the call of the policy implementation by the Department of Education. Hence, I am compelled to create personal and professional reflections on the challenges of the implementation of the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2010 in relation to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which has been one of the celebrated contents from his pioneering works in The Republic.

            In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Socrates described a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives facing a blank wall. The people watched the shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and gave names to these shadows. The shadows were the prisoners’ reality and they thought of the voice coming from the people passing by the fire as that of the shadows projected on the wall. Philippines is one of the last four countries in the world to implement a 13-year basic education program. For the past decades, we have been implementing the same system that the Americans established when they colonized the Philippines – this has become the reality of the Philippines’ education for the past decades. While there have been several attempts to reform our system of education before this revolutionary reform, those attempts have always been marred by negative criticisms like the Philippines is not ready for the shift as it could even hardly provide quality education within the required 10-year basic education – how much more a 13-year basic education which would require bigger budget for facilities, teacher development and others. This has been the reality of the Philippines’ basic education system for the past years and we have long accepted and lived with this reality for it has been a significant part of our lives. We have produced graduates who became significant parts of the global workforce with the Philippines being one of the top countries producing workers for various industries in the world. Policy makers did not see the need for a change because we have not experienced any detrimental effect of the current education system to our society. As Filipinos, we were enclosed in a cave of our own reality and it took us decades to realize the need for a shift to a more competitive system of education. As we enclosed ourselves with the said reality, there were factors that we had to key in why we had to retaliate any attempt for change. We had budgetary concerns as a third world country and just like the people in the cave leashed in order for them not to see the reality outside the cave, our vision as a country has been cuffed with various issues such as poverty which entangled us with other issues like health and food sufficiency. For most Filipinos, toiling to ensure that something could be served on one’s plate has been more important than looking into the need for education reform. We sometimes continue to create our own versions of reality and continue to believe in them not because we refuse to see a better version of it but because there are circumstances that deliberately tie us to the realities that we created. Just like the prisoners in the cave, we do not desire to leave the prison because we know no better life or we lack understanding of what is better because of the circumstances that continue to oppress us from unleashing our deemed ignorance.

            One day, the prisoners managed to break their bonds and discovered that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun which Plato used as an analogy of the fire that the people in the cave could not see behind. For the prisoners, the sun is incomprehensible especially that they have never seen it in their entire lives. I could directly relate this to the many failed attempts of our policy makers to reform our education to that of K+12. When the concept of the K+12 program was introduced to us, we could hardly accept it because it was a new realm of reality and it would challenge our long-established version of truth of the education system. Why would we need to painstakingly undergo an ambitious reform if we have survived decades of conceived glory as a nation with the system of education that we have. On the other hand, it is also important to note that we sometimes deny ourselves of a better reality not because we do not understand it but we focus so much on our limitations and the pain that we have to undergo when we have to go out of our comfort zone to experience the promise of a better reality. In this case, we encounter an incomprehensible realm. Just like in the allegory that the sun would hurt the eyes of the prisoners and they would escape by turning away to the things which he was able to look at, and these he would believe to be clearer than what was being shown to him, we heard an outrage from various sectors of the society denying the need for a reform as the current state of education is clearer than this less known system that we have to undertake. Nevertheless, someone had to drag us in order for us to see the light but as it was done to us, we experienced pain which triggered an uproar and when we eventually saw the sun, the radiance hurt us causing us to negatively react. Change is painful and the journey towards reform is always a struggle because we have to go through stumbling blocks of doubt or comfort or the state of being cynical to the facts which are less known to us.

Departing the Cave and Embracing K+12 Education

As a nation, we have not fully departed yet from the cave when it comes to the implementation of the K+12 Curriculum.    While we have heard good feedback from the first batch of graduates last school year in terms of their college readiness, employability and acquisition of skills, there are significant setbacks brought about by the redundancy of the curriculum offered by higher education institutions, lack of confidence from some of the industries to accept graduates of the K+12 program and the most recent agendum of the Department of Education on its plan to review and revise the curriculum. These are some of the setbacks that could be likened to the prisoner’s glary sight of the sun that holds him back from fully seeing the reality. Until the prisoner could strongly see the sun with its brightness, he would not be able to justify the sun as it appears and his reasoning of the new reality would be weak. It would take time for our society to fully mature with this new education paradigm and live within the brightness of the light that is spotted to us. However, I stay positive that in less than a decade, this new system of education will bring us to another level of maturity that will enable us to produce more competent basic education graduates who are not only ready for higher education but are also ready to supplement the needs for technical workforce in the industry and citizens who will fully take part in nation building as a result of their strong foundation in the basic education.

I am positive that the time will come that university education will only be an option for some of the graduates as they already find their basic education sufficient for them to become significant contributors for economic development and social transformation.

Transitioning Back

            In a matter of a decade or two, provided that there is going to be a continuum in the progress that has been made in the implementation of the K+12 Curriculum, we will be expecting a new breed of basic education graduates whose competence is at par with our ASEAN counterparts or our global counterparts. By then, we will be looking back at how we have been and how far we have progressed in our journey towards a more competent education. Will we be happy of the outcome of this reform? By then, we could only measure the success of this reform through the parameters that we will set in reference to our goals. By then, we could hopefully see a better nation with citizens who are more competent and better contributors of nation building.   

            On the other hand, the question remains if we are still willing to transition back to what we were used to after we experience positive impacts in various aspects of our nation or what could be the possible repercussions of this reform.   

Conclusion

            Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a remarkable literary work that tells us so much about how people react to change and how poignant change is for a certain society. In fact, for some communities, change involved some lives as collateral damages in an attempt to transition from once practice or idea to another. People’s tendency to retaliate change is not necessarily because of them not open to embrace a new concept or culture that is being introduced but because of their failure to see the bigger picture of the need for the change. At times, it is brought about by many factors like poverty, lack of education, economic constraints and others. These factors could be related to the leash that bars the person from seeing the light behind him and the animate objects outside the cave.

            Plato’s Allegory of the Cave could be a good source of reflection each time we attempt to implement change in a certain organization or introduce something new in our classroom. In the level of our students, we have to understand that they came from different backgrounds with several orientations of reality. New ideas might be poignant for some of them at first but we owe them a sound explanation and we have to guide them through the process. As educators, our responsibility should not only to show the students what is better – we have to let them experience and reflect why such is better.