Miseducation

Caabay, Jan Veah P. Score:

BS Biology PreMedIV Date: March 5, 2014

2nd Semester SY 2013-2014

Reflection Paper: The Miseducation of theFilipino

”The Miseducation of the Filipino”, talks about the coming about of the retribution of such action in the lives of the Filipinos, then, now, and perhaps the future.

I am a pure Filipino citizen and thus studied elementary and high school in the Philippines, and I know for a fact they we used both English and Tagalog as the media of teaching. In the long run, I think this resulted in both positive and negative ways — positively, because as I have just realized, I feel the “impediment” in my thought process because I cannot think consistently in one language. All in all, I liked this piece because it reiterates the importances of education to not only produce literate people but also to produce people who would use that education to better their nation.

Personally, I learned and realized very many things about the history and relationship between the Americans and the Filipinos upon reading this paper. It is quite intriguing what the main reasons really were for Americans in taking power over the Philippines. Was it for the good of the Filipinos or the Americans’ good? Whatever it was, they succeeded in almost every aspect of conquering the land because they knew the most effective way to subjugate their minds: by controlling their education. They created a new generation of good colonials, the “unFilipino” Filipinos. The indigenous ways of life of Filipinos had been changed to the American way of life. That was ridiculous because certainly, America and Philippines vastly differed from each other in so many ways, and therefore, their ways of life based on their differing needs should be entirely different. But the Americans insisted on creating a “carbon-copy” of themselves in Filipinos through the imposition of their language in their education.

The...