MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Risa Hontiveros yesterday scored the Department of Education (DepEd) under Vice President Sara Duterte for having a role in the rebranding of the Marcos family by not affiliating the late Ferdinand Marcos with the dictatorship.
Hontiveros was reacting to a memorandum released by the DepEd’s Bureau of Curriculum Development (BCD) dated Sept. 6, ordering a change in the nomenclature in the Grade 6 Araling Panlipunan curriculum on the martial law years – from “Diktadurang Marcos” (Marcos dictatorship) to just “Diktadura” (Dictatorship).
The move was met with strong opposition from the education sector, students and critics of the martial law years, which were marked with corruption and human rights abuses until the elder Marcos’ ouster through the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution.
For the critics, this was yet another effort of the Marcos family to burnish their names at the expense of thousands killed, tortured and imprisoned during the late strongman’s martial rule.
“My position has not changed over the years – memory and truth-telling are the cornerstones of justice,” Hontiveros said.
The opposition senator stressed the importance of education in making sure that the country’s dark period in history will not repeat itself.
“An accurate historical record is a guide to a better future. There are things that should not have allowed rebranding to happen,” Hontiveros said.
Removing the Marcos family name in the grade school syllabus for social studies containing the lesson on the Marcos dictatorship was not ordered by President Marcos nor Duterte, who is concurrent education secretary, according to the DepEd.
Jocelyn Andaya, director of the DepEd’s BCD, said the decision was made through collective discussions among agency executives and insisted that the move did not involve politics amid questions on its timing now that the Marcos family is back in Malacañang.
“We had a very robust discussion about it … a very spirited discussion, and after a while, we had a consensus as to what will be included in the curriculum, what to place and what not place in the curriculum,” Andaya said in an interview on dzBB radio.
“No one ordered this. It was a collective decision,” she added.
Andaya explained that the process of revising or crafting curricula falls solely under the jurisdiction of the BCD, which then gathers experts to validate their proposal.
The BCD is an office under the undersecretary for curriculum and teaching.
After it goes through BCD, the proposal is processed in other offices to evaluate the documents, the curriculum guide and the guidelines in delivering the curriculum, according to the DepEd official.
“Tackling issues need to be thematic. The subject is challenges to democracy, so under it, it includes the declaration of martial law, the implementation of the dictatorship, its effects on our democratic institutions such as freedom to legislate, a weakened economy, violations of human rights and ill-gotten wealth,” she said.
“It also includes the fight to end it. So we really just adjusted things… (The Marcos name) may not be in the title of the topic, but it’s in the lessons because, at the end of the day, our learners should be able to think critically about what really were the problems and challenges in the democracy at the time when martial law was declared,” she added.
Andaya said the delivery of the adjusted lessons on the Marcos dictatorship would be pilot-tested.
“It will be implemented now while we are working on a pilot implementation, during which we can see whether it requires major changes,” she added.
Private schools, however, may opt out of renaming the topic as they can go beyond the standards imposed by the DepEd even if they are within its regulation and supervision, according to the Coordinating Council of Private Education Associations (COCOPEA).
“Although, of course, we follow the minimum prescribed curriculum or standards of the DepEd, we have a certain flexibility or discretion to offer additional subjects, topics… that are not necessarily offered to public schools,” COCOPEA legal counsel Kristine Carmina Manaog told TeleRadyo Serbisyo.
“We maintain what the private schools think is necessary or appropriate in their curricula. If that particular detail needs to be retained, then we will follow what private schools adopted as subjects or curriculum,” Manaog added.
Meanwhile, Duterte told memo’s critics that if they have any problems with the changes, they should take it up with experts within the DepEd’s education strand.
“They can argue with the education experts inside the curriculum and teaching strand of the DepEd because it was they who decided in this direction,” the Vice President and education chief told reporters.
Rebranding
Dissociating the Marcos family’s name from the dark days of martial law under Marcos Sr. from grade school lessons is the worst rebranding initiative of the current administration, militant group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) said yesterday.
In a statement, Bayan president Renato Reyes said the initiative of the administration, through the DepEd, to yank out the Marcos family’s identity in the title of grade school lessons on martial law should not be accepted by the public.
“The efforts to rebrand the dictatorship points to an apparent long-term plan to entrench the Marcoses in the highest positions of governments, even after the term of Marcos Jr. has ended,” Reyes added.
Bayan and other cause-oriented groups will gather at Liwasang Bonifacio on Sept. 21 to commemorate the 51st anniversary of the declaration of martial law and protest the continuing human rights violations, corruption and economic decline under the current administration.
“We will affirm that the dictatorship then was led and made possible by Marcos Sr., and that his family was the principal beneficiary of plunder and concentration of power during this period,” Reyes said, as he urged the public to demand justice and accountability from the Marcos administration.
Reyes also criticized Marcos’ attendance at another F1 race in Singapore during a time that the country remembers the atrocities of his father’s dictatorial rule and extreme economic crisis as the height of sensitivity.
Budget cuts
In another development, professors, students and employees of state universities and colleges (SUCs) are decrying budget cuts and “unjust” policies in higher education, calling on lawmakers to increase the funding for SUCs instead.
As the House of Representatives summoned the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) again yesterday, SUC stakeholders trooped to the Batasang Pambansa to call on lawmakers to address the pressing issues of SUCs instead of slashing their budgets.
University of the Philippines Faculty Regent and Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT)-SUCs chairman Carl Ramota lamented that it was unjust for the government to be spending millions in confidential funds next year while more than half of SUCs have less than P20,000 funding per student for one semester.
“The Marcos government wants to slash next year’s budget for SUCs by P7 billion and the CHED budget by P1 billion, a big part of which are for student scholarships and free higher education funds,” Ramota said.
“These proposed P8-billion cuts in tertiary education budget spell grave repercussions to the operations of our already struggling public universities and the already limited enjoyment of the Filipino youth’s right to education,” he added. — Neil Jayson Servallos, Emmanuel Tupas