The Senate has formed the Education Commission to review the K-12 curriculum, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian said Sunday.

In an interview with dzBB, Gatchalian said: “We have formed the EdCom or the Commission on Education. And we will look into many things and one of them is the curriculum of the children,” he added.

Basic education should focus on reading and math so that teachers and students will not have difficulty focusing on so many subjects, said Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate Committee of Education.

“Not only students but also teachers are having a hard time concentrating. So maybe it would be good to lessen the competencies. These are the subjects that the children study. This would be better for them. This is the aim of DepEd (Department of Education). I know Dr. Gina Go, who is an education expert. She was appointed to thoroughly review the curriculum,” said Gatchalian.

Gatchalian stressed the importance of going “back to the basics”, since almost 90 percent of Filipino children cannot read, citing a joint report by United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), and the World Bank.

“We really should go back to the basics…we should concentrate on reading and math because it was shown that almost 90 percent of our 10-year-olds don’t know how to read," Gatchalian said.

''If you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to count. So we should go back to the basics. Teach them to read and count so that when they enter senior high school, it would be easy for them,” he added.

Under the K-12 program, students attend kindergarten and have 12 years of basic education. That includes six years of primary education, four years of junior high school, and two years of senior high school.

The K-12 program was implemented in the school year 2012 to 2013 under Republic Act 10533. Jaspearl Tan/DMS