The Senate has approved the bill making Good Manners and Right Conduct a core subject under the K-to-12 curriculum and be taught to all public and private elementary and high school students.
Senate Bill No. 1224 or the proposed Comprehensive Values Education Act will be taught to elementary and senior high school students for an hour daily once it is enacted into law.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, sponsor of the bill, welcomed this development as this would allow students to acquire values and apply these in their actual real life experience.
Gatchalian said the bill specifically mandates values education curriculum to include clear, distinct, specific, and concrete character-building activities such as role-playing in the classroom, community immersion activities, teacher-parent collaborative learning activities, school initiated values formation activities, simulated activities, and other forms of experiential learning undertakings.
“This will allow students to gain real-life experiences in applying their values to difficult situations, but in a controlled environment where experienced educators will help them process the lessons they learned in a constructive and nurturing way,” he said.
The measure proposes a mother tongue-based multilingual education approach to be adopted in teaching values education to ensure that the subject is accessible and user-friendly to students.
It also mandates the Department of Education, in coordination with the Commission on Filipino Language and in collaboration with education academic and research institutions, to formulate a mother tongue-based multilingual framework for teaching and learning. (Hannah Torregoza)