John Jonas explains the K-12 reforms that added two years of senior high school to the Philippine system, letting students choose academic or vocational tracks like agriculture and fisheries. He contrasts this with the U.S. system and shares stories of young Filipino workers who studied while working, better prepared for jobs or college.
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Changes in the Philippines school system. So every once in a while I talk with my OFS team about our kids. Most of mine are older than most of theirs, but not all. I have five kids, the youngest is eight, the oldest is 19, and I have three in between those. So there's a, there's a pretty good span of ages. My ofs, Julia just was telling me this last week about how her daughter, her oldest daughter is about to start high school. She's 12, which I thought was odd because I know that in the US high school starts. Kids start high school when they're like 14, 15 and they start junior high when they're 12. So in the Philippines they don't have junior high. They do this kind of differently. So it's normal to start high school when you're 12 or 13. Middle school gets skipped. So kids go from elementary school, which I think they call it grade school. They go from grade school to high school and then just like here, they finish high school in four years. It's a four year thing. However, when they're done with high school, they, you can't go to college and you can't work first you have to go to senior high school. So senior high school is kind of a recent development in the Philippines starting like 2012. It was the result of like the K through 12 basic education program trying to be improved. So in 2012 the program meant was intended to help improve the quality of students graduating from high school. So they graduate from senior high school. So when they go to college or when they start working later, then they get that they're more, they're more well prepared. Another aim of this was to ensure that students couldn't enter the workforce unless they had a senior high school degree. The Philippines is really big on education and so someone who doesn't graduate from senior high school, it's really rough there for them. So what makes senior high different from high school in senior high is when they start to choose the track that they want to pursue. Like they start to learn applied skills and there's a ton of things that they can be learning. But some of these things include like agriculture and fishery or home economics or like industrial arts machinery. There's all kinds of things in senior high school they can start to progress towards. Not just math and science and reading. Senior high school kind of starts to prepare them to either take a course, a college course in what they're looking for or to enter the workforce. When a student finishes senior high school, they should have like basic skills to get hired in that field. Now obviously, if you could just have basic skills out of senior high school, you're not making very much money and frankly they're not. It also means though, that you have some basic skills to start a college, diplomas to start, like progressing in other education things, which they very, very often do. In fact, most of the time they do that at onlinejobs ph. Where you find these, these workers, they're allowed to register when they turn 18. We don't allow them to register before they're 18, but when they're 18 is when they're probably graduating from senior high school and they're not really skilled. And so what you'll often find is someone who's registering at 18 or 19, they're also pursuing a college degree. That person is then getting more and more education. They're very much a beginner if they're 18 or 19, don't have really have much skill. But I have hired people like that and they're eager to learn and they're just real, you know, they're good, good people. And as they progress, they become indispensable to my business. So I'll give you one example. I didn't know this when I hired him, but my video editor who edited this video and edited this audio, this, this podcast, he creates all of our graphics for all of our advertising. He does all of my video editing. I hired him when he was still in college. He was, he was kind of early on in college actually. And after a recent podcast episode where I talked about how hiring people, hiring students is a questionable thing, I didn't realize he was a student. He told me, he responded to me after he edited it. He said, hey sir, just so you know, when you hired me, I was still in college and I made college fit around my life. He said, I wanted to work, I want to edit videos, I wanted to be in the industry and I love it. And so I made college work based around my work. So he has since graduated from college. He's amazing. I gosh, I mean, I love the work that he does. He's so dang good. And a lot of that comes from skills from senior high, skills from college, but skills from him just being a go getter and learning and wanting to know and do better, and he consistently does that. So just so you know, the Philippines government is really invested in this. They're really invested in education and in improving the ability of the workforce to accomplish their goals and improve their lives and generate more income.
