St.

Catherine’s College
6019 Carcar City, Cebu
Department of Graduate School
Educ 201 (Philo. of Education)
AY 2022-2023 First Semester

Name: Jesse B. Ababon Date: November 18, 2022

Professor: Letitia Florido Time; 11:30-2:30 P.M. (Saturday)

Problems Of Philippine Education

It is uncommon to hear college teachers decry the quality of students that come to
them. They lament the students’ inability to construct a correct sentence, much less a
paragraph. Private schools have been assailed as profit-making institutions turning out
half-baked graduates who later become part of the nation’s educated unemployed. All
these are indications of the poor quality of education.

The major problem of the tertiary level is the large proportion of the so called
“mismatch” between training and actual jobs, as well as the existence of a large group
of educated unemployed or underemployed. The literature points out that this could be
the result of a rational response to a dual labor market where one sector is import-
substituting and highly-protected with low wages. Graduates may choose to “wait it out”
until a job opportunity in the high paying sector comes.

To address this problem, it is suggested that leaders in business and industry should be
actively involved in higher education. Furthermore, a selective admission policy should
be carried out; that is, mechanisms should be installed to reduce enrolment in
oversubscribed programs and promote enrolment in undersubscribed ones.

It is in the educational sector where the concept of globalization is further refined and
disseminated. It comes in varied forms as “global competitiveness,” “the information
highway,” “the Third Wave Theory,” “post modern society,” “the end of history,” and
“borderless economy.”

The so-called Philippines 2000 was launched by the Philippine government to promote
“global competitiveness,” Philippine Education 2000 carried it to effect through training
of more skilled workers and surplus Filipino human power for foreign corporations to
reduce their cost of production.

The Philippines, including its educational sector, is controlled by US monopoly capital

through loan politics. This task is accomplished by the IMF, the World Bank and a
consortium of transnational banks, called the Paris Club, supervised by the WB. The
structural adjustments as basis for the grants of loans, basically require liberalization,
deregulation and privatization in a recipient country.

As transplanted into the educational sector, deregulation is spelled reduced

appropriation or reduced financial assistance to public schools through so called fiscal
autonomies; privatization and liberalization is spelled commercialized education or
liberalization of governments’ supervision of private schools and privatize state colleges
and universities.

The WB-IMF and the Ford Foundation have earmarked $400M for Philippine education.
These loans financed the Educational Development Project (EDPITAF) in 1972; the
Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education (PCSPE) in 1969; the Program
for Decentralized Educational Development (PRODED) in 1981-1989. As pointed out by
many critics, “the massive penetration of WB-IMF loans into the Philippine Educational
System has opened it wide to official and systematic foreign control, the perpetuation of
US and other foreign economic interest, and to maximize the efficiency of exploiting
Philippine natural resources and skilled labor.”

A number of studies and fact-finding commissions such as the Sibayan and Gonzales
Evaluation (1988), the Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education
(PCSPE, 1969), and the Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM, 1991-
1992) have pointed out that the problems of Philippine education are the problems of
quality and political will