PNoy's New Education Team

The only familiar name is Dr. Yoly Quijano. I know her to be a sensible and low profile (not into grandstanding) leader. She has been with us in promoting MTBMLE being a major implementor of the Lingua Franca Project. I hope that during her stint as USEC she can push strongly for BESRA (financed by a $200 loan from WB but was stalled since 2005 because of lack of push from GMA's administration).

Googling the other DepEd appointees showed that they are from the private sector, mostly products of Jesuit-run universities (working with a boss who virtually spent all his schooling life in DLSU). They are new to the basic education sector and will need sometime to know the intricacies of basic education, as a bureaucracy, a sector and a discipline with its own history and worldviews. I am pretty sure that their children have been educated in the private school system. It will take some time before they would see and understand the culture within our public school system. I hope they will try their best to immerse in the system so that they will earn their right to lead and not be treated as perpetual outsiders.

They will take their seats during a time of massive hemorrhaging of our workforce. Flights are canceled because 25 PAL pilots have left the country and more are posed to leave. There was misforecasting of weather because our experienced meteorologists are gone. Not too long ago we read of hospitals closing down due to lack of doctors. And so on. I wonder how corporatist neoliberal minded leaders would address this concern. It would be interesting to see what kind of market oriented solutions they will craft together to address a problem caused by the same worldview that they subscribe to.

Their presence in DepEd would reinforced the managerialist orientation to our education system. It has its advantages since it tends to promote efficiency, accountability and bottomline kind of thinking. However such orientation when pushed to the extreme tends to be pro-globalist, prescriptive (accdg to global/western standards) and sees learners more as labor inputs. It does not place much value on strengthening cultural identities and local knowledge, contextualization of education to local realities and the formation of critically minded citizens. These concerns are marginalized in a pro-market corporatist educational system.

My only hope is the fact that PNoy's new usecs most likely come from a business group that in the past advocated for transformative solutions like MTBMLE and school-community partnerships. I wish them all the best.