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'Lessons on Marcos dictatorship cannot be mysterious and nameless'

September 14, 2023 | 7:05pm

A worker removes ribbons placed by demonstrators on the Bantayog ng mga Bayani bearing the names of martial law victims.

The STAR / Michael Varcas

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Education memorandum dropping “Marcos” from “Diktadurang Marcos” in the curriculum could be the start of efforts to fully clear the Marcos name from their record of rights violations and corruption, advocates dedicated to defending historical truth said.

Condemning the word change in the revised K to 10 curriculum, the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom said that the education department is muddying “indisputable historical facts” on the Marcoses by detaching them from the “dictatorship.”

“Because of these changes, indisputable historical facts such as human rights violations and large-scale corruption and robbery suddenly become ‘effects’ of a mysterious and nameless ‘Dictatorship,’” the group said.

Disassociating the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. from his authoritarian regime could also obfsucate Filipinos’ “heroic struggle to recover their rights and freedoms” by making it seem like they fought a “murky abstraction called ‘Dictatorship’,” the group added.

The group said: “Like a natural catastrophe, ‘Dictatorship’ becomes unaccountable on human terms, with the difference that even the weakest typhoons have names.”

DepEd previously stressed that the controversial word change in the Araling Panlipunan curriculum was a result of a routine review by curriculum specialists and not due to “pressure of any kind.”

While the department clarified that teachers can still use the word “Marcos dictatorship” in their lessons, they also called for a “balanced” perspective in discussions of the administration of Marcos Sr. — a well-documented period of history characterized by widespread rights abuses and diminishing of basic freedoms.

“Perhaps the sycophants at the DepEd and their anonymous ‘expert scrutinizers’ were told that the Marcos family should be spared the embarrassment of having their name constantly associated with some of the worst crimes in our history for which they were never brought to justice,” the group added.

The DepEd directive to remove “Marcos dictatorship” from the basic education curriculum could “just be the beginning of a total rewrite,” it said.

Similarly, Project Gunita, a team of history advocates preserving original documents and evidence during the Martial Law period under Marcos Sr., called out DepEd for "aiming to hide such a basic fact" such as Martial Law.

“But this is how state-backed historical distortion works: it starts with the obfuscation, or denial, of basic facts. That is how the war against truth is waged, a battle that the Marcos and Duterte regimes have so mastered in the last seven years,” Project Gunita said.

In 2022, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the late dictator, was quick to dismiss any concerns that his administration would rewrite or remove history lessons pertaining to the abuses during his father's regime.

Marcos Jr. mentioned twice — once in his inaugural speech and again in his first State of the Nation Address — that he was not referring to history lessons when he suggested improving the content of educational materials.