TITLE: The Philippines Still Hasn't Fully Reopened Its Schools Because of COVID-19.

What Is This
Doing to Children

AUTHOR :CHAD DE GUZMAN

FINDINGS: 17-year-old Ruzel Delaroso needs to ask her teacher a question, she can’t simply raise her
hand, much less fire off an email from the kitchen table. She has to leave the modest shack that her
family calls home in Januiay, a farming town in the central Philippines, and head to an area of dense
shrubbery, a 10-minute walk away. There, if she’s lucky, she can pick up a phone signal and finally ask
about the math problem in the self-learning materials her mother picked up from school.

“We’re so used to our teachers always being around,” Delaroso tells TIME via the same temperamental
phone connection. “But now it’s harder to communicate with them.”

Her school, Calmay National High School, is among the tens of thousands of Philippine public schools
shuttered since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Delaroso is one of 1.6 billion
children affected by worldwide school closures, according to a UNESCO estimate.

But while other countries have taken the opportunity to resume in-person classes, the Philippines has
lagged behind. After 20 months of pandemic prevention measures, amounting to one of the world’s
longest lockdowns, only 5,000 students, in just over 100 public schools, have been allowed to go back to
class in a two-month trial program—a tiny fraction of the 27 million public school students who enrolled
this year. The Philippines must be one of a very few countries, if not the only country, to remain so
reliant on distance learning. It has become a vast experiment in life without in-person schooling.

“[Education secretary Leonor Briones] always reminds us that in the past when there were military
sieges, or volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, typhoons, floods, learning continued,” says education
undersecretary Diosdado San Antonio.

But has it this time? Educators fear that prolonged closure is having negative effects on students’ ability
to learn, impacting their futures just a time when the country needs a young, well-educated workforce
to resume the impressive economic growth it was enjoying before the pandemic hit.

Globally, COVID-19 will be impacting the mental health of children and young adolescents for years to
come, UNICEF warns. School shutdowns have already been blamed for a rise in dropout rates and
decreased literacy, and the World Bank estimates that the number of children aged 10 and below, from
low- and middle-income countries, who cannot read simple text has risen from 53% prior to the
pandemic to 70% today.

If the pilot resumption of classes passes without incident, there are hopes for a wider reopening of
Philippine schools. But without it, there are fears of a lost generation.
TITLE:Philippines economic outlook 2022

AUTHOR:By Jon Canto and Kristine Romano

As the Philippines continues to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, our new research aims to
provide directional scenarios and insights into lasting trends.

FINDINGS;As the Philippines continues to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, our new
research aims to provide directional scenarios and insights into lasting trends Companies doing business
in the Philippines are assessing the implications of COVID-19 on the country’s economy. They are likely
to find that three shifts introduced during the pandemic will persist into the future: economic activity
will be digitally enabled but also hyperlocal; the wealth gap is widening, and new consumer segments
have emerged; and the pandemic is likely to result in a greener and more sustainable economy.he
healthcare sector is expected to grow through 2022, while pharmaceutical manufacturing is likely to
remain steady. Certain consumer behaviors—digital-care adoption, focus on preventive care and
wellness, and interest in value for the money—are likely to stick after the pandemic.

The travel and hospitality sectors are poised to surpass 2019 growth in 2022, although headwinds could
stall tourism recovery until 2024. In the interim, companies can take targeted actions to reinvent
themselves and grow out of the pandemic. In financial services, the banking sector could take up to five
years to recover from its 2020 drop in return on equity (Exhibit 3). Among Filipino consumers, active use
of digital banking and e-wallet services has increased significantly.

The healthcare sector is expected to grow through 2022, while pharmaceutical manufacturing is likely to
remain steady. Certain consumer behaviors—digital-care adoption, focus on preventive care and
wellness, and interest in value for the money—are likely to stick after the pandemic.

Likewise, the energy and power sector is expected to expand through 2022. Finally, the outlooks for IT
business process outsourcing (BPO) and remittances from overseas Filipino workers, a resilient lifeline
for the Philippine economy, remain strong (Exhibit 4).
TITLE:The Philippines in Imperial History

AUTHOR:Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto

FINDINGS:The aim of this article is to draw the attention of historians of empire to one of the most
neglected components of Western imperial systems. Although the Philippines was ruled successively by
Spain, the United States, and Japan for more than four centuries, it occupies only minor place in
standard histories of Western imperialism and often is not mentioned at all. Yet, historians of the
Philippines have produced work of high standard on themes that prompt comparison with studies of
other colonies. The illustrations selected here refer, respectively, to the rise of anti-colonial movements
within the colony and the links between embryonic nationalism and similar trends elsewhere in
Southeast and East Asia. The originality and vitality of the literature on the Philippines deserves to be
much better known outside the country. Equally, historians of the Philippines can gain from connecting
their work to the wider historiography of Western imperialism.

as executed by his successor, Emilio Aguinaldo, in 1897, the cause was parked in a layby until fuelled by
new radical movements in the 1920s and 1930s. The revolution was not only unfinished; it had scarcely
begun. In its place came the American-inspired interpretations that Ileto reacted against as a young
Ph.D. student.

Notable writers had already found a place for the ‘masses’ in the story of the Revolution. Teodoro
Agoncillo had interpreted Katipunan from this perspective and linked the Revolution to both the
previous history of resistance to Spanish rule and the radical forms that culminated in the Huk rebellion
of the late 1940s.8 In 1975, Renato Constantino produced a people’s history of the Philippines that also
emphasised the role of non-elite Filipinos.9 For all their merits, however, these contributions shared
important weaknesses. In bringing material forces in, they put religion out; they claimed to speak for the
unheard majority but neither study was based on the voices of those they considered to be the moving
force of history. Both accounts incubated methodological problems. Agoncillo was over-influenced by a
teleology in which past events were judged according to their ability to explain the present; Constantino
applied a formulaic analysis that treated the history of the Philippines as an exercise in accumulating
class consciousness. From Ileto’s perspective, both writers underestimated the initiative that gave the
‘poor and ignorant’ agency in creating the movement that led to the Revolution of 1896.
Title: The state of the Philiphines Art Scence during the Covid- 19 Pandemic

Author: Franz Sorilla IV

When the world stopped because of covid-19, activities that catered to a libe audience were
compromised. Most effected was the arts, be it performing or visual. But such a creative field found the
ways to show their art and reach their audience confined at home. Museums and galleries began
offering virtual and audio tours and opened their exhibitions via digital meeting rooms.Since most of
their colleagues in the visual arts ecosystem have gone digital,lopa hopes that online version of the art
event will continue to raise funds for the museum foundation of the Philipines. ‘’We are trying to do
what we can to support Filipino visual artists at this diffult time,’’ – Trickie volayco- lopa says.

As the world has gone into quarantine to combat the spread of COVID-19, many scholars are looking to
the past to see how populations have handled pandemics and isolation. Art has long been a way for
societies to cope with tragedy and uncertainty, so Columbia College Today recently sat down (remotely!)
to talk about art, plagues and resilience with classmates Franco Mormando ’77, professor of Italian and
chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Boston College, and Thomas
Worcester ’77, professor of church history and president of Regis College in Toronto. In 2005,
Mormando and Worcester co-curated an exhibition, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of
Plague, 1500–1800, at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass. The show examined visual art as
a response to repeated outbreaks of bubonic plague in Europe. The pair collaborated again in 2007 as
co-editors of the book Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, which examines the religious,
cultural and psychological aspects of pandemic. Following are edited excerpts of the discussion.
TITLE:Philippine elections and the politics behind it

AUTHOR:ANDREA CHLOE WONG

FINDINGS:Filipino voters go to the polls to choose who will govern them but not necessarily how they
will be governed. Lining up to register to vote in Antipolo City, Philippines (Ryan Eduard
Benaid/NurPhoto via Getty Images) While broadly similar to other presidential forms of government, the
Philippines’ system of choosing its leaders does hold some nuisances which reveal deeply-rooted
problems in Philippine democracy. The following are some of the long-standing realities of its politics:
Leaders elected based on minority votes In the country’s plurality or “first-past-the-post” system, the
candidate with the highest number of votes wins, while others are left with nothing in this “winner takes
all” set up. But with multiple candidates vying for a single post, “vote splitting” is inevitable. Thus, a
broadly unpopular candidate who nonetheless has solid voter support can emerge victorious based on
the rule of minority.

The Philippine president and vice president are elected separately

Unlike other presidential systems such as in the United States, which field candidates on a joint ticket,
the Philippines allows for split-ticket voting even when political parties push for candidates as a tandem.
Split-ticket voting has become a trend in Philippine elections based on preconceived (and misleading)
notions of providing checks and balances between the president and vice president when they are from
different parties. What it tends to produce instead is a conflict of interests in terms of policy formulation
and implementation.

The deeply-rooted patronage system in the Philippines bolsters money politics, especially during

elections.

Moreover, the vice president’s authority is largely dependent on the president and therefore has limited
power to “check” on the president. The commander-in-chief can assign a cabinet post to his/her second-
in-command as a sign of “partnership for convenience” or totally isolate him/her as an indication of
“open hostility”. This latter scenario aptly describes the current relationship between Duterte and Vice
President Leni Robredo. Duterte sees Robredo as a critical opposition figure (she has declared her own
bid for the presidency) and has shunned her from his administratiThis year’s election, set for 9 May, is
another personality-based popularity contest for the presidency. Except for Robredo and Senator Panfilo
Lacson, who are banking on their government experience, presidential candidates are emphasising their
stardom and family connections to get elected – international boxing legend Manny Pacquiao, former
movie actor Isko Moreno, and Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son of and namesake of the former dictator.Such a
line-up means that the candidates’ campaign narratives generally swirl around their persona. Duterte’s
victory in 2016 was attributed to his well-curated “strongman” image, amplified by a solid social media
campaign. Thus, charisma and mass appeal are the focus rather than policy platforms or track record.
This is amply demonstrated in most campaign events that sideline substantive debates in favour of
entertainment shows. “The people won’t listen if you debate an issue or present a platform,” remarked
Senator Ronald dela Rosa in 2019 about his campaign rallies. “If you have said several platforms, they
think this politician is just … full of words, but no action.”