⤹ education in the philippines: what the fuck?

Hello hello! Another blog after my yearly inactive period of writing of course, the burn out is REAL guys. This is probably going to be my first formal post in a while and moreover my first post discussing a similar topic to this. I won't spoil much in this intro but I'll definitely be sharing my thoughts and my first hand experience with this moving forward, not going to stall anymore so Enjoy reading!~

What The Hell?

The Philippines! My place of birth. I think it's safe to say living my entire life here that I am subject to what I believe is one of the worst education system's on the planet. Not to undermine others but I think with all the bad rep that my country has been getting in terms of its governance, its politics, and its government offices and as the next generation in line to suffer the consequences of the very... likeminded people of my country, we're royally f*cked. And I mean that in the most disrespectful way I can.

I would say I am a very patriotic person, I love my country and I'm very proud of my country, I love the diversity in culture and the traits that a true Filipino has but that wouldn't blind me from how sincerely bad the education is here in the Philippines. It can get good, sure, but for most students it is genuinely bad but there's one specific thing I want to focus on today. There is an array of issues I could discuss here, most are obvious like: poor management, a lack of a budget for education, low quality facilities, not enough professional teaching staff and for colleges it's even too many privileged students entering state universities but I think it's right to write about something that I feel most passionate about and that is the lack of creative thinking in Filipino students.

No More Creative Thinking

One of the biggest flaws of our education system is just that. You see, the way grading works here is purely based on what you can offer that is by the textbook itself. In Filipino classroom you can see how this works, with majority of the work being centered around memorization, being too focused on standardized testing, and being so strict to one structure of teaching that it leaves close to no room for divergent thinking.

Let's tackle these terms one at a time. The education in the Philippines is severely outdated, thus it's unreasonably heavy emphasis on things like memorization and standardized testing. It's due to this outdated system that teachers in the Philippines are being trained to teach only using traditional methods. Alot of the classes here in the Philippines are teacher based systems, where teachers dictate the lesson and students are expected to just listen and absorb this information. Of course not all classes are like this, but this is the most known teaching method known to our classrooms.

My experience with this kind of teaching in class was absolute hell, our attention spans were already being degraded by things like the Internet and TikTok and I was forced to sit through multiple lessons a day with only a 30 minute break to be able to digest it all. It was a ton of information overload and very often I couldn't even bring myself to focus in the class. I was passively listening for sure but aside from that I was just jotting down what sounded important and told myself to just read the powerpoints the teachers would send afterwards.

There's also a lack of application when it comes to this teaching style. I found that alot of my own teachers would just teach and nothing else. Performance Tasks take up 50% of our grade and these include things like group projects and reports, you get the drill, but it's rarely that we would even be given these by our teachers as our work was based heavily on written tasks such as quizzes and recitation. Heavy on that recitation part.

I found this to be the case with even my arts based teachers as well. The system here is so outdated that even teachers within a creative field are trained to teach in a way that's systemic and analytical and I know that's supposed to be the case with academia but shouldn't we allow the arts department, a field that's specifically known for it's creativity and its human touch, to have a more creative approach to teaching their subjects? In the current K-12 curriculum here in the Philippines we have 1 subject called MAPEH which is basically a combination of Music, Arts, Physical Education, and Health. It is our only arts based subject with a combination of others. 4 subjects smashed into one that a teacher is forced to teach to students within the span of 10 months and that students are basically loading their brain with.

Can you imagine? Having to become proficient in the base 7 subjects, plus your singular elective subject (Typically TLE), and then on top of that having to be proficient in just the memorization aspect of your MAPEH subject? Where is the creativity in that case?

The system here is so focused on the grade aspect itself. Because some teachers are heavily reliant on just what numbers you are able to produce on paper that it translates to your grade. The creatives of our country are quite literally being taught to throw that away because creativity isn't as valued as it should be. Not in the educational space and definitely not in the workspace either as I've seen a lot of my friends who have graduated highschool and moved into their senior high school years and their college years abandoning their dreams of becoming creatives and turning to STEM based subjects because they know that there is no money to be made in the field of arts.

Not only is arts not appreciated in the fields of education, it is not appreciated outside of it. It's rare that anyone ever makes money outside of arts. Hell, its the same case in Humanities. Our country is what I'd like to call the breeding grounds for STEM Students. In my current school, out of 809 students, 694 are STEM students, 58 are ABM students, and 49 are HUMSS students. Why so many STEM students? Because all of us have based our dreams in becoming doctors, engineers, and lawyers, and why is that? Because both our government and the majority of schools have already little to no appreciation for students, but they have less for those in the creative fields. Money! Money is the cause of happiness and it's been ingrained into our heads that the only way to make money is to become another cookie cutout of the same successful people in our world. The only way to even make it into the State Universities in my country is by taking STEM as your senior highschool course because guess what? They've built the exams around STEM students. This leaves out the rest of the strands behind because guess what? We aren't STEM students, we weren't taught what they were taught, we went for what we wanted and that was our first mistake.

I don't regret taking my course as a HUMSS student. I love humanities, I aspire to become a politician, I aspire to become a lawyer, I want this strand, I love this strand. But god damn this it sucks. It genuinely sucks because I know further down the line I will suffer for taking what I wanted to be. For pursuing my dreams. And I know that this is the mindset of every student that is going to follow before me and we're already seeing the effects of it.

How? Where? In June 2024, the PhilStar reported that in the newly introduced creative thinking assesment of the Programme for International Student Assessment of the 2022 cycle, the Philippines ranked in the bottom 4 amongst 64 countries. Bottom 4. Students are being taught to only memorize what's written, to not explore outside of what they were taught, and this is the result. The Philippines already ranked lowest performing in Mathematics and Science, now we're also lacking in what is supposed to be instinct for all of us. Weren't we all born with this unwavering curiosity? I know that that fades over time, but even then has the system brainwashed us so bad into thinking that pursuing those kinds of fields are so worthless it's no longer worth nurturing outside of an academic setting?

And just to give you an example of how bad the lack of creative thinking is, during a small Q&A my professor was doing in our Understanding Culture, Society, and Politics (UCSP) and our Disciplines and Ideas in Social Sciences (DISS) class we were asked what the flaws of our government was. My classmate beside me and I saw multiple others pull out their phone and ask ChatGPT. In another class we were brainstorming for an idea in our group project and I asked our members, what kind of design we should do for an infographic about crystals and for an entire minute no one could give me an answer. It took someone to search through ChatGPT to give me an answer.

What design should we do for an infographic about crystals? What are the flaws of our government? We're relying on AI to answer these questions?

What the fuck?

We're Cooked

Shouldn't we, in this day and age, be fostering this kind of field more and more? Majority of my generation seems to think so but in the eyes of those who hold power in the education system, it's far to big of a leap to implement these kinds of changes. Sadly we won't see this kind of improvement in the thinking of students and the encouragement of anything other than the sciences and maths for a long time to come. Especially since for years now this kind of thinking? A dead set in our brains. I applaud those that truly pursued what they love and are happy in it. I wish to be like them to but I know it was such a risky decision to do so especially in a STEM focused country like ours. DepEd Philippines! AYUSIN NINYO! As a humanities student and as a student in general we are sick and tired of your bullshit! Get your act together because I swear to fucking god I will riot against you and your President and Secretary!

Hello helloo! Thank you to everyone that's read this far! It's been a while since I posted something like this and honestly I miss it alot. I've been really busy since I moved schools and it's been a learning curve trying to balance my life out with this new change but since I'm starting to get a hand at this expect more content from yours truly! <3 Look out for the next one or re-read some of my older posts while you're at it. I don't do this for the views but would love to hear your thoughts <3

With matsalab,

Zabeth