The Filipino in Obsolescence: Citizenship and Educational Policy Reform in the Philippines
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THE FILIPINO IN OBSOLESCENCE: CITIZENSHIP AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY REFORM IN THE PHILIPPINES BY ELIZER JAY Y. DE LOS REYES THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Educational Policy Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Master’s Defense Committee: Professor William Cope, Chair Professor Cris Mayo Professor Cameron McCarthy ii ABSTRACT The K to 12 program implemented by the Philippine government in June 2012 added two years in the then ten-year long basic education curriculum, universalized kindergarten by making it compulsory, and introduced a tracking system that includes academic, technical-vocational, and entrepreneurship tracks. Within this educational policy reform, this paper examines how the Philippine state expresses, constitutes, and legitimizes Filipino citizenship; makes sense of citizenship by tracing the transformation of Filipino citizenship from colonial to the post-colonial as a contextualization; characterizes the emergent Filipino citizen in the K to 12 program; and reflects on this new citizenship in light of existing socio-economic differentiation in terms of class, gender, and ethnicity. To respond to these tasks, this paper uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1992, 2001, 2003) which merges the tradition of linguistic analysis of text and social theory. Using primarily Fairclough’s models on CDA as theory and method complemented by views from Wodak (2001), Gee (2004), Jäger (2001), and Rogers (2004), this paper analyzes five documents produced by the executive and the legislative branches of Philippine government. This paper argues that citizenship when traced from the colonial to the contemporary Philippine society presents a complex transformation marked by the complications of the Spanish, American, and Japanese occupations, the Marcos dictatorship, the long-standing diaspora, and globalization. An analysis of the K to 12 documents reveals that the emergent Filipino citizen enshrined in the recent K to 12 reform presents a “holistically developed Filipino” equipped with 21st century skills marking the insufficiency of Filipino citizenship as being god-fearing, humane, nationalistic, and nature-caring which has been previously circulated. The increasing iii colonization of neoliberal calculation both in educational policy-making and the construction of Filipino citizenship is also evident in the K to 12 documents. Lastly, this paper concludes that the K to 12 reform demonstrates that education policy is never value-neutral, that it becomes a field of contestation among competing views of citizenship negotiated by synthesizing them with respect to “presentist” economic needs and existing power relations which in the end, generate new inequalities or perpetuate pre-existing ones, both in their symbolic and procedural senses, whether intended or unintended. iv To my mother, Violeta Yague de los Reyes v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am forever indebted to all people who, in their professional and personal capacities, mentored and inspired me to finish this piece of work. I would like to express my gratitude to individuals and organizations that made my graduate education and accomplishing this thesis easier. My sincerest gratefulness to the Fulbright Scholarship and the Philippine-American Educational Foundation for making what was once a far-fetched wish a reality. I thank you for funding my studies, for the generous and sufficient funding that allowed me to focus and rest when I needed to. I cannot help but say thank you to Dr. Esmeralda Cunanan and the entire team for believing. I also wish to thank the Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership Department of the College of Education especially Dr. James Anderson for the support and guidance in all the necessary steps from my registration to thesis-writing. Thanks to Dr. William Cope, my thesis adviser for always making himself available, for being so considerate whenever I needed feedback earlier than what is expected, and for his constructive comments in my writing. I am forever grateful for allowing and helping me to grow as an academic. I am also thankful to Dr. Cameron McCarthy and Dr. Cris Mayo for their honest and constructive comments and for agreeing to be part of my master’s thesis committee. Your suggestions have definitely bettered this paper. I am grateful to my family, Nanang, Tatang, Liza, and Brian for making me feel that being home is possible even when I am literally thousands of miles away from you. Thank you for the Saturday conversations we have had over the phone, or the funny Skype talks we patiently scheduled to overcome time differences. vi Writing this thesis has also been easier because of friends and acquaintances. Thanks to Aibee for making me feel that I was not the only one struggling. Thank you to Sophy, Ga Young, Nang, Mauro, Sergio, Carolina, and Terry for lifting my spirits. I would also like to say thank you to friends who were part of the short-lived talking and writing circle that helped me during the initial conceptualization of this paper. Above all, I am grateful to the ONE who made everything possible. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION.………...…………………………………………………….....1 CHAPTER II: THE JOURNEY OF THE UNIVERSAL CITIZEN TOWARDS FLEXIBILITY: A LITERATURE REVIEW OF CITIZENSHIP FROM MARSHALL TO ONG ...........………14 CHAPTER III: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS THEORY AND METHOD…….…32 CHAPTER IV: FROM INDIO TO FILIPINO: EDUCATIONAL REFORMS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF CITIZENSHIP FROM 1901 TO 1994…..…….………………….61 CHAPTER V: THE FILIPINO IN OBSOLESCENCE: DISCURSIVE STRATEGIES ON CITIZENSHIP IN THE K TO 12 REFORM of 2012……………....…………………………...97 CHAPTER VI: THE K TO 12 REFORM AS A DISCURSIVE AND SOCIAL PRACTICE...142 CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS…………..……………….197 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………206 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Filipino children, just like many other kids the world over, are socialized by their parents and teachers to envision themselves, as somebody who would become significant or to the fullest extent successful individuals in the future. Young boys and girls find it commonplace to be asked questions such as “what do you want to be when you grow up?” In the same way, when asked to justify why they choose to be a lawyer, a doctor or whatever it is they dream of, they are also accustomed to respond to these questions by exclaiming phrases such as “because I want to help the poor”, or even the more romantic “I want to make our country great”. And so they go to schools carrying their big dreams that one day, they will be wearing a coat and tie arguing loudly against a competing counsel, or don a white robe with a stethoscope hanging around their necks. Unfortunately, in a nation that continues to struggle with poverty, there is an inevitable disjuncture between “dreaming” and “becoming” which forms part of a more conspicuous segment of the larger complications of Philippine education and society. Two significant and recurrent phenomena, of the many other malaises in Philippine society form this complex: the indubitable presence of poverty and the pressure to be liberated from it. The National Statistical Coordination Board (2011) reports that poverty incidence among Filipino families was at 20.9% in 2009, a minimal reduction from the 21.1% recorded in 2006.1 Encarnacion (2012) claims that in 2009, the Philippines was still lagging behind the Millennium Development Goal 1 (MDG) which is the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger with only 4 1 To understand the extent of poverty in the Philippines along with the number of people living in poverty and the total population in 2006 and 2009, the NSCB reports in its summary of projected population following a five-year interval that in 2000, the population of the Philippines was 76.9 million, 85.3 in 2005, and 94 million in 2010 (National Statistical Coordination Board, 1997-2014). 2 of the 17 regions of the Philippines being above their targets (slide number 13) although Concepcion (2012) mentions that the chance of achieving the said MDG in 2015 is “high” (p. 2). On the contrary, the joint report of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2013) on the progress of countries in the Asia-Pacific mentions that the Philippines has a slow progress in achieving the reduction of people living below a dollar a day (p. 8). Alongside the problem of poverty is the unemployment of many Filipinos2. In the two periods of 1998 and 2011, there had been a remarkable decline of unemployed Filipinos from 9.6% to 7% (index mundi, 2011) although in July 2013, the unemployment rate went up to 7.3% (Remo & Santos, 2013) which is better than the recorded 7.5% in April 2013 (Cerda, 2013). One may think that these socio-economic challenges are recent, but unsurprisingly, they have been bothering the nation for the longest time. It could be traced back even as early as the Marcos regime for example when official poverty rate was at 44% in 1985; was curbed significantly to 40% in 1988 during the Corazon Aquino presidency; 36% in 1994 and 33% in 1997 when Ramos was president; 28% in June 2000 during the administration of Estrada; and 24% in 2003, 27% in 2006, and 26% in 2009 during the Arroyo government (Social Weather Stations, Self-Rated Poverty Table 1, 2011). While poverty rates have been seemingly declining, except for the increase in 2006, the Philippines is still far from the comfort of a self-sufficient economy and a situation of full-employment or perhaps, what may be called “ideal unemployment rate” of 5% which according to Chris Pissarides, a Nobel 2 According to Sicat (2013), “Philippine labor statistics define “unemployment” as a situation of workers at least 15 years old and over who are without work but currently seeking work.