7

Globalization and the Philippines’

Education System
Swee-hin Toh and Virginia Floresca-Cawagas

Some fifty years ago, the Philippines emerged from three centuries of
Spanish colonialism and another five decades of US rule. In the eupho-
ria of statehood, modern schooling that had been significantly shaped
under American tutelage promised hope and mobility for individuals
and economic progress for the country. After fifty years of post-colonial
development, it is imperative to reflect on the value of education in the
lives of more than 70 million Filipinos.
The Philippines is a beautiful island nation of warm-hearted, intelli-
gent, and resourceful people. Yet, thousands of children struggling to
survive on the streets are deprived of basic education. The urban poor
suffer from homelessness as they work in jobs that do not adequately
provide for their basic needs. In the countryside, the rural majorities eke
out a marginal existence. Meanwhile the flow of Filipinos abroad to seek
work has become a torrent, yielding two billion dollars of remittances
to an economy burdened with crippling debts. Throughout the archi-
pelago, resource extraction, boosted by export-oriented growth-first eco-
nomic policies and strategies, leaves a trail of irreversible environmental
destruction. Even after the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship, social
and political conflicts continuously surface as the dominant moderni-
zation paradigm of development aggravates social injustice and sparks
armed revolutionary struggles. The increasing spread of globalization
towards the end of the last century has placed even weightier burdens
of poverty, indebtedness, and marginalization on the shoulders of the
vulnerable majority of Filipino children, women, and men.
Scanning this societal landscape, it is certainly meaningful to ask
what role education in the modernization paradigm has played in the
complexities of national and international development. In the face
of numerous social, economic, political, and cultural problems, does the

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K.-h. Mok et al. (eds.), Globalization and Educational Restructuring in the Asia Pacific Region
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2003
190 Globalization and the Philippines’ Education System

Philippines educational system bear any responsibility or accountabil-

ity? Most importantly, can and should educational values, practices and
structures be transformed so that they can help build a nation based on
the principles of justice, human rights, non-violence, and democracy?

Education for development?

In the post-colonial era, most South governments took seriously and

aggressively the task of building and expanding education. Billions of
dollars were invested in education, most of which came from foreign
aid programmes. Private organizations, churches, and individual fami-
lies were similarly committed, pouring precious time, capital invest-
ment, and human resources into education. It was argued that
education is an important way to provide ‘human resources’ or ‘human
capital’ necessary to sustain modernizing and growing economies.
According to this logic, educational investment promotes economic
growth, while on the individual level, education is said to facilitate
social mobility (Burnett, 1996; Harbison and Myers, 1984). In the latest
UNESCO World Education Report (1998), this productivist view of edu-
cational quality and purposes is mentioned as one of the two main
strands of educational policies worldwide. The Report explains further:

‘Assessment,’ ‘adjustment,’ effectiveness,’ ‘performance outcomes,’

‘fiscal constraints,’ and of course ‘human capital’ are just some of the
signs of how widely the productivist view has permeated educational
policies compared, say, thirty years ago.
(UNESCO, 1998, p. 30)

The 1980 World Development Report (World Bank, 1980) argued that
because education has a positive influence on cognitive as well as non-
cognitive skills of learners, it increases the rates of return among the
self-employed and the employed in the developing countries. It is
further believed that education fosters political citizenship as values and
attitudes of democracy are learned.
Most countries welcomed the growth of educational aid, which
included physical equipment, buildings, textbooks, foreign experts, and
scholarships to study abroad (Bown, 1988; Farrell and Heynemann,
1988; Harbison and Myers, 1984). Educational structures and institu-
tions became dominated by formal academistic schooling and hurdles
of entrance examinations. This was propelled by the philosophy of
putting young people into classrooms for a number of years, awarding