Renato Constantino: The Mis-Education of Filipinos

There is no denying that the quality of education in the Philippines is such a hit and miss. We
have globally competitive students that bring glory to the country, but we ourselves, knew deep
within that we can never truly credit this to the quality of educational systems that we have here.

In context to the status quo, before we correlate this to the index of the reading. We can identify
the Philippines as a developing country, third world, as they call it. When our economy, political
systems, government systems and educational systems are openly flawed but are rarely called
back to reform due to unfair privilege, and hidden minorities. We can all throw burden to the
government’s lack of initiative in the mitigation of educational system flaws.

According to Rene Constantino, in his writing, he specifically determined that there is a flaw in
the system due to colonization. The minds of the people were met with a large disparity due to
the medium or language used. Since then, information has become inaccessible. It has been a
norm that if you cannot speak the common tongue, you are either not fit to be educated or are
not privileged enough to receive education in the first place. Due to this fact, the system enabled
and fostered ignorance among its citizens. Digressing from the matter, we can qualify as a
benefit that yes, the Filipinos were welcomed to the pool of knowledge, our literacy to the
English language has allowed us to converse better with the outside world. We became
progressive and welcoming to the solutions and systems offered by the Americans, but with that
very same breath, we failed to acknowledge how our system became corrupt and failing due to
lack of internal-rooted support and reinforcements The mis-education of the Filipinos not only
affected our competence but also our image as a country, we became susceptible and
vulnerable to the colonial mindset, more often than not, we fail to converse deeper into proper
formulation for the mitigation of our political climate, our economic standings and systems as a
whole.

Ringing back the spark of ignorance, due to the lack of proper structuralization, we can infer that
the citizens have become more passive of the systematic issues we have at hand. Having
initiatives for the betterment of the systems have become subjective and only under the extreme
motivation of a few. Because of this, the quality of living has lopsided, as more and more only
choose to have education for self-benefit than would-be concept of nation building.

To Constantino, in his works, he claimed this as a programme of cultural assimilation combined

with a fairly rapid yielding of control resulted in the general acceptance of American culture as
the goal of the Filipino Society, thus the slow and painful death of nationalism.

In conclusion, we can fairly see this in effect, the evidence is striking outside our windows, even
within us. The way we emulsify the colonial mindset, we can never deny that our educational
systems kill the Filipino concepts, and we live merely under the umbrella as to how the colonists
have embedded and monopolized power over us. Systems must be changed simultaneously to
the mindset of the people. This long tedious process is our shot to reclaim proper education and
well deserved systems for the Filipino people.