The Senate circus: What went wrong?
Just over a month after pro-Duterte troll farms and aligned traditional politicians tried to silence yours truly for factually pointing out the unfathomable Human Development Index disparities in the country, yet another set of statistics confirmed my basic hypothesis. According to the latest data released by the Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) under the auspices of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), eight of the 10 provinces with the poorest literacy rates in the country hailed from Mindanao. Fortunately for the PSA, it’s unlikely that the institution or its staff would be honored with the privilege of persona non grata status by the coterie of what can be best described as persona trapos.
Lest we fall victim to puerile regionalism, however, it’s important to underscore how our education crisis has a more national rather than regional dimension. Firstly, the beautiful island of Mindanao is diverse and home also to some of the most developed provinces in the country: South Cotabato, for instance, was among the top 10 regions in terms of functional literacy per FLEMMS. Moreover, another important PSA data painfully highlights the profundity of our educational crisis: as many as 19 million Filipino high school and senior high school graduates, who completed secondary education from 2019 to 2024, are reportedly struggling with basic indicators of functional literacy. And, for the first time in history, no Philippine university managed to crack into Asia’s top 500 list in the Times Higher Education annual survey.
Coupled with the country’s dismal rankings in the Programme for International Student Assessment, which examines basic comprehension and science literacy among high school students, and the World Bank’s even more shocking report of “learning poverty” incidence of 90.9 percent in our basic education, it’s crystal clear that we’ve got a generational challenge of enormous proportions.
Much of the collapse in our educational standards coincided with the rise of the Duterte dynasty, which directly controlled all state institutions between 2016 and 2022 and, under Vice President Sara Duterte, directly controlled the Department of Education between 2022 and 2024. Clearly, neither the father nor the daughter possessed the basic competencies to address the crisis even if they wanted to.
To be fair, the education challenge transcends the singularly incompetent reign of the Dutertes. As early as 2013 (“Philippines’ Real Economic Achilles Heel: An Educational Crisis?”, Huffington Post), I warned of the “seemingly inverse relationship” between the Philippines’ “glittering growth figures” and the “alarming decline in the prestige and rankings of its leading universities.” Back then, several of our higher education institutions were still ranked among the top 500 universities in the world.
No institution, however, better reflects the declining quality of our overall education than our most august legislative body. Once upon a time, the likes of Jovito Salonga topped the senatorial race—not once, but three times! But that’s also where we failed: the chattering classes loved his oratorical skills, but our educational institutions and mainstream media failed to make the broader population appreciate why we needed the likes of Salonga and his high-minded debates with his mostly patrician colleagues. Meanwhile, our oligarchs constantly sabotaged any constitutional and operational effort to establish a truly party-based political system, which would diminish the influence of dynasties.
The upshot was a “democrazy,” with a toxic form of personality-based politics fully colonizing our democratic space while full-fledged “celebritization” trumped merit and substantive policy discourse. Soon, even Ivy League-trained technocrats, such as Mar Roxas, had to rely more on PR actioners than platform and policy experts to win a seat in the Senate. A few years after his “Mr. Palengke” victory, veteran actor Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. topped the Senate race, closely followed by fellow entertainer Jose “Jinggoy” Ejercito Estrada Jr. As for Juan Ponce Enrile, he didn’t even bother to run on any substantive platform—he seamlessly won a seat on a vacuous slogan: “Gusto ko happy kayo!”
In retrospect, should we be surprised that the likes of Robinhood Padilla would manage to top the same race a decade later? That a cabal of Duterte factotum and washed-up entertainers are topping this year’s preelection surveys? Clearly, the rot at the heart of our political system runs deeper than the catastrophic decade-long Duterte era. Unless we mainstream “critical thinking” and enhance our political literacy, Philippine democracy is doomed.
—————————————-
