The growth of Filipino students’ dreams cannot be halted. They want to finish college and help their parents. They also want to advance in their career, so they gather a lot of information to choose the right profession for them, get guidance from psychologists, and attend career orientation and seminars in school. In senior high (grades 11-12), they want to make sure which academic track to pursue, aiming to excel in their chosen strand, whether it be Accountancy, Business, and Management (ABM); Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS); Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM); or General Academic Strand (GAS). This stage is crucial. When choosing a strand incorrectly, the student may simply struggle or go back to the beginning, or repeat the process.
(In the SHS program, the students also have a Technical-Vocational-Livelihood Track, with four strands to choose from: Agri-Fishery Arts, Home Economics, Information and Communications Technology, and Industrial Arts.)
I had a registered electrical engineer (REE) student who even took a psychology course. He said that the first was at the will of his parents and the second was the one he wants in himself. If he took and passed the two licensure examinations, I do not think there is something wrong with his decision to have two professions. In fact, it is an admirable decision on the part of the son in finding the middle ground as he was at the time under the guidance and financial support of his parents. There is nothing wrong with that, but that rarely happens because usually, one completed course is enough for an average Filipino student. (There are still many who do not go to college, although the statistics of the Philippines has improved vis-à-vis the number of enrollees in colleges and universities.)
In the K to 12 system, we assume that the student has already received the correct guidance on what course to choose, whether with parental guidance or not, thanks to his academic track preference in high school.
The new phase of guidance just continues. The student will be under the guidance of the college guidance counselor. The guidance office also has career orientation, as well as job placement programs or job fairs for those who are about to graduate.
I want to say where the student made a mistake in choosing a profession in case he did not finish on time. But my expertise is not psychology, although I know something about consumer behavior and teach understanding the self, one of the core general education (GE) courses for college students. I always say things that can encourage my college students to continue studying, “galingan lagi” (always get better), and if they do not finish on time, they will consider themselves to be in the process of a “reasonable delay” (a Peter Senge theorizing under his self-help book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, buoyed by Peter Drucker’s seminal article “Managing Oneself.”)
If the disadvantaged students hold on to their studies, professors can look at it as students’ way of giving justice to their tough academic situations by rendering quality decisions within reasonable delay/s and, therefore, can give them extra points in humanities and social sciences subjects.
In the same vein, people serving in government have several options to deal with the young Filipinos’ delay in gaining knowledge or finishing their academic tasks while under the care of their parents. Are we all on the same page, minding what we can to help them realize their full potential and dreams?
DC Alviar
Professor DC Alviar serves as a member of the steering committee of the Philippine International Studies Organization (PHISO). He was part of National University’s community extension project that imparted the five disciplines of a learning organization (Senge, 1990) to communities in a local government unit. He writes and edits local reports for Mega Scene. He graduated with a master’s degree in development communication from the University of the Philippines Open University in Los Baños. He recently defended a dissertation proposal for his doctorate degree in communication at the same graduate school under a Philippine government scholarship grant. He was editor-in-chief of his high school paper Ang Ugat and the Adamson News.
