There is an effort to enforce educated choices. How educated and mature can 16 year old decide for the rest of his/her life? Filipino teens have to do that in an early age of 16 by choosing the college degree you should see yourself sticking for the rest of your life.
The k12 system wishes to enhance the capacity of a Filipino teen. It is a conscious effort to internationalize our educational system. The rest of Southeast Asia is under the same system for quite sometime. However, it is only in the last 2 years that the Philippine educational system adopted this. This does not directly addresses ‘right choice’ for the rest of your life. It is mainly called, globalization.
Teens and even adults have varying facets that we want to live by. Some, at an early, age knows that they are ought to be in politics because of family lineage. Some has showed potential to be an artist. Some are highly influenced by the community issues they belong. Sometime in their life, with the demands that surrounds them, forces them to change career path.
At 16, how can one determine the best course to undertake? Internships are most of the time the answer. Exposure to a working environment can either fortify their goals or make take the other way around. These working environment challenges them. Working environment cultivates the existing skills, surfaces potential never explored, or kills their dreams. These offices either kills or encourages growth.
Lucky are those who have guiding households. Those who have mastered guidance counseling approaches in their own families. How about those who does not have the foundation? How about whose parents who works in menial jobs, uneducated and lost themselves?
Decoding potentials are never easy, especially at an early age. Teenage years is always equated with peer pressure. Younger people are forced to respond to the what they deem to be the needs of the most visible market. During early 2000s, there was a high demand for nurses because of the aging Baby Boomers of the Western countries. The post-industrial working class has opted not to have children or have atleast one or two. It leaves them with no one to take care of them. This is very western in perspective. However, global migration for work (the top reason why people moves from one place to another) makes Filipinos susceptible to the law of demand and supply in the First World countries.
The expansion of the market, the creation of new demand and neoconsumerists created new jobs. Who would have thought that lounges infront of their computers will be one of the most lucrative job? Creative thinking and machine building to be the most needed skill set. It should be note worthy that these skill set are even the hardest to teach and pay-it-forward. It targets a small percentage of human population that could actually be autodiact and explore these new skills that current international market demands. I bet this is not something that your grand ma dreams for its grandchildren.
Younger people should be given the guided choices, and not forced into their college application. Exploring one’s potential and putting it side by side with its innate skill set is still best way to do it. Virtu and Fortuna and the Myth of Metals as the Philosophers suggest.