Stop with the “globally-competitive” education myth.

Here’s why:
Our manifestation of a “globally-competitive” education churns out workers for other countries. While being a BPO worker and being an OFW are respectable endeavors, I can’t stress enough how exporting workers is not the way to go in improving the economy. We need to produce, manufacture, and export to liven up the economy. Hence, education should produce citizens who could harness our resources, not turn students into cheap labor for other countries. Also, fuck you Arroyo.

PISA is unreliable since it measures students in a eurocentric framework. The goal of our “globally-competitive” education had turned into how we can present the highest scores in these international assessments, albeit in questionable ways. Look where it got us: bad PISA scores, and irrelevant curricula. But we keep using PISA as benchmarks for our educational goals, so the cycle continues.

Before we could be globally competitive, we must be locally competitive. Curricula should reflect the realities of the students, and adjust to their frameworks. For instance, in terms of the language of instruction, the official language is English in most subjects. But most students don’t even use English when talking to their families at home. So we really have to ask: is the curriculum made to serve the children or just to provide the space for administrators to circlejerk to their “globally-competitive” fantasies

The answer is simple: put the children first. When creating curriculums, don’t imagine future workers, instead see the children at their levels. They got their whole lives ahead of them to be disappointed by the dismal economy, so don’t make them grow up so fast.

Instead of showing a picture of a complete flower in a textbook, go out the garden and pluck out a gumamela and show it to the children. Instead of using the abstract concepts to teach arithmetic, use jolens and sungka. In teaching them history, don’t just let them memorize the dates, but use current local and national politics to compare the events in the past to the present’s political cockfighting (sabong).

Before teaching them the Iliad and the Odyssey in English class (altho they slap so go ahead), teach them the Biag ni Lam-ang first, and have them contextualize the Greek epics into the indigenous constructions of an epic. Instead of teaching them how to make tiramisu in home economics class, teach them how to make ube tiramisu.

Tldr; localmaxx, before globalmaxxing. indigenize before you suck white cock.