MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION AND THE POLITICS OF RECOGNITION IN THE PHILIPPINES: A CRITICAL REVIEW
Abstract
This paper criticizes the Philippine Education Curriculum's attempt at embracing and implementing multiculturalism. Specifically, it aims to expose the recurring issues of instruction paradigm seen in existing pedagogy. Using Charles Taylor’s view of Identity Politics, as well as Paolo Freire’s Banking Concept in education, and Jean Paul-Sartre’s existential phenomenology, this paper points out the issues in Philippine Education's instructional paradigm leading to oppression. Reflexivity is given emphasis to build on the theme of identity and recognition embedded in the discussion. In this paper, I exposed the main challenge of multicultural education in a predominant instruction-centered paradigm, which is politics of recognition in the classrooms, resulting to [what I posit as] academic othering, which I consider as the cornerstone of an age-old oppressive paradigm in Philippine education. Such problem is characterized by the imbalance in the power relations that is not just imposed onto the students, but has been institutionalized historically as an unconscious yet structurally-motivated way of oppression in education. Despite the promising goal of multiculturalism in the Philippines, our education continues to struggle with the challenges of creating equal opportunities and proper treatment of individual and communal differences.
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