Every June, I stand in front of a new batch of pre-service teachers and ask them to read a paragraph aloud. It is a small, almost old-fashioned exercise, and I keep doing it because it tells me more about where Philippine education is heading than any policy briefing ever could.
This year, the hesitation was louder than usual. Words that used to trip off the tongue of a typical Filipino undergraduate, words like “particularly” or “consequently”, now come out clipped, mispronounced, or simply avoided in favour of a safer synonym. I do not say this to shame anyone. I say it because I have spent close to two decades training the people who will one day stand in front of a Grade 4 or a Grade 10 class and teach English to children who are watching TikTok in three languages before breakfast. If the future teachers are struggling, the children down the line will struggle too.
The MATATAG curriculum was supposed to be the correction. It promised fewer competencies crammed into a school year, more time for reading and numeracy, and a return to what DepEd calls foundational skills. I have read the framework closely, partly out of professional obligation and partly because I wanted to believe it would work. Some of it is genuinely sound. The emphasis on phonics in the early grades is overdue, and teachers I have spoken with say the shorter list of learning competencies has, for the first time in years, let them actually finish a lesson instead of racing through it.
But a curriculum is only as good as the person delivering it, and that is where my worry sits. Teacher education programmes across the country are still producing graduates who were themselves taught under a system stretched thin by the pandemic years. Learning loss did not disappear when the classrooms reopened. It migrated into the next generation of teachers, and now it is quietly becoming part of the profession’s muscle memory. I see it in my own students’ lesson plans, in the way grammar is taught as a set of rules to memorise rather than a system to notice and use. I see it in how few of them read for pleasure, which is perhaps the most honest predictor of how they will teach reading to someone else.
I still think Filipino teachers, especially the young ones entering the profession now, are more resourceful than the system gives them credit for. I have watched a 22-year-old intern turn a broken air conditioner and a sweltering afternoon into an impromptu lesson on descriptive language, asking her students to write about the heat itself. That kind of instinct cannot be taught in a methods course. It has to be modelled, and it has to be protected once these teachers leave the university and enter classrooms with forty-five students and no budget for supplementary readers.
What I keep returning to, as both a lecturer and someone who edits academic writing for a living, is that English proficiency in this country was never just about grammar drills. It was about access, to better paying jobs abroad, to scholarships, to the kind of confidence that lets a student challenge an idea instead of just copying it down. When that proficiency erodes, it is not a footnote in an education report. It changes what is possible for a whole generation of Filipino graduates competing in a global labour market that has not lowered its expectations.
I do not have a tidy solution, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to. What I have is a classroom full of future teachers, a stack of lesson plans to mark by Friday, and a stubborn belief that the work of fixing this happens one reading exercise, one mispronounced word, one patient correction at a time. It is slow. It is not particularly glamorous. But it is the only version of reform I actually trust.
Rona dela Rosa, PhD is an associate professor at the Polytechnic College of the City of Meycauayan.
