Senate approves GMRC bill on third and final reading

Voting 23-0, the Senate on Monday approved on third and final reading a bill seeking to institutionalize values education, including Good Manners and Right Conduct (GMRC), as a core subject in the K to 12 curriculum.

Under Senate Bill No. 1224 or the Comprehensive Values Education Act, elementary and high school students in public and private schools would be required to take a mandatory GMRC subject for an hour daily.

For kindergarten students, values education would be integrated into their daily learning activities.

GMRC was removed as a regular subject and was integrated with other subjects, including Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao and Araling Panlipunan under the K to 12 curriculum.

In the said curriculum, values education was taught for 30 minutes daily in primary education and an hour twice a week in secondary education.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, sponsor of the bill, said the amount of time allotted to values education was inadequate as it did not provide enough time for teachers to engage students in meaningful discussions and exercises on values formation.

SBN 1224 mandated that values education classes would 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 activities.

“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,” Gatchalian said.

The bill also called for a mother tongue-based multilingual education approach to be adopted in teaching values education to make the subject more accessible and user-friendly to students.

The bill mandated 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.

Teachers with certification, diploma, and training in the field of values education and other allied disciplines would be given preference in the teaching of the subject. At present, educators said that 70 to 90 percent of those who teach values education were not certified values education teachers.

The bill also stated that the DepEd would conduct an annual review of the institutionalization of comprehensive values education in the K to 12 program curriculum to ensure its proper implementation and assess student learning outcomes for the purpose of determining its efficacy.

The DepEd would also need to establish linkages and provide the necessary support to strengthen parent-teacher partnerships to enable parents to perform their vital role in the effective institutionalization of the values formation education. — DVM, GMA News