The Filipino in obsolescence: citizenship and educational policy reform in the Philippines

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 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.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Policy Studies

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• De Los Reyes, Elizer Jay

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cope, William

• citizenship
• educational reform in the Philippines
• citizenship education
• critical discourse analysis
• Philippine education
• ethnicity, class, gender
• citizenship as social practice
• social inequality

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Elizer Jay De Los Reyes

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49843

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/49843