Three Policy Imperatives on Budgetary Priorities, Medium of Instruction, and Curricular Content Towards Raising the Quality of Education in the Philippines (Part 3 of 6)

*In Part 3 of this six-part series, Dr. David Michael M. San Juan (david.sanjuan@dlsu.edu.ph) of Tanggol Wika discusses the last of the three basic problems of the Philippine education sector: curricular content that does not align with the conditions of Philippine society and what it needs.

3. Curricular content in some subjects/curriculum guides are not socially relevant and/or not aligned with the country’s needs.

Aside from the aforementioned dominance of English as medium of instruction, there are many aspects of Philippines which shows that what we teach are not relevant to our citizens’ realities and our country’s needs. For example, when K to 12 was legislated in 2013, various stakeholders opposed its implementation partly because of its design which explicitly restructured Philippine education to suit global standards and corporate needs, and to further bolster the country’s labor export policy (see San Juan, 2013; Sison, 2015; Aquino, 2015; San Juan, 2016). Hence, the country’s education system is still far from the nationalist education system which esteemed historian Prof. Renato Constantino envisioned (1970): “The education of the Filipino must be a Filipino education. It must be based on the needs of the nation and the goals of the nation. The object is not merely to produce men and women who can read and write or who can add and subtract. The primary object is to produce a citizenry that appreciates and is conscious of its nationhood and has national goals for the betterment of the community, and not an anarchic mass of people who know how to take care of themselves only… We have learned to use American criteria for our problems and we look at our prehistory and our past with the eyes of a visitor. A lot of information is learned but attitudes are not developed. The proper regards for things Philippine, the selfish concern over the national fate — these are not at all embedded in the consciousness of students. Children and adolescents go to school to get a certificate or diploma. They try to learn facts but the patriotic attitude is not acquired because of too much emphasis on forms. What should be the basic objective of education in the Philippines? Is it merely to produce men and women who can read and write? If this is the only purpose, then education is directionless. Education should first of all assure national survival. No amount of economic and political policy can be successful if the educational program does not imbue prospective citizens with the proper attitudes that will ensure the implementation of these goals and policies. Philippine educational policies should be geared to the making of Filipinos. These policies should see to it that schools produce men and women with minds and attitudes that are attuned to the needs of the country.” Among other things, the K to 12 curriculum abolished Philippine history as a subject in junior high school, and allotted much space for foreign literature in Filipino subjects (despite the fact that we have plenty of local, regional, and national literary works to read and study, and more works are obviously written every year). These should be taken into consideration in ensuring that the new curriculum would be socially relevant and generally aligned with the needs of our communities.

From https://twitter.com/indiohistorian/status/1298580883297845249

Read the rest of the series:

Part 1

Part 2