The blind spot of the reframed teacher education curriculum

On May 27, 2025, the Teacher Education Council approved a “reframed” set of Professional Education Courses for pre-service teachers.

At first glance, it appears neatly organized under four domains: The Learner, The Teacher, The Learning Process, and The Teaching Process. It is packaged with modern priorities—learner-centeredness, inclusivity, literacy, and extended practicum.

But beneath this structure lies a dangerous void. The orientation is glaringly individualistic, apolitical, and ahistorical—detached from the socio-political, socio-economic, and historical realities of the Philippine education system it claims to reform.

Where in this reframing is the teacher’s role in analyzing and challenging the system they are entering? How will future educators examine the structures of inequality, exclusion and colonial legacies haunting Philippine education? Where are they trained not only to survive the system, but to change it?

The curriculum’s silence on these questions is deafening. In a country where education is deeply enmeshed in political dysfunction and socio-economic disparity, omitting courses on critical analysis, historical consciousness, and advocacy is not neutral—it is a political act.

It contradicts the principles of critical pedagogy, which call for education that interrogates power structures. This is not mere oversight; it is erasure.

The curriculum emphasizes courses like “Human Growth and Development,” “Foundations of Special and Inclusive Education,” and “The Teacher as a Person and as a Professional”—focused on personal development, psychology and ethics.

These are important, but insufficient. Education is not merely about managing learners’ growth; it is also about shaping citizens who can engage with a nation’s past and fight for its future.

The curriculum seems content with producing technically competent, emotionally intelligent teachers—never mind if they are historically blind, politically disengaged, or environmentally unaware.

Even the courses on learning—“Learner-Centered Teaching,” “Literacy Theories,” “Assessment”—center on methods, tools and techniques. 

But methods are not ideologically neutral. What philosophies undergird these approaches? What social agendas do they serve? Are teachers being equipped to recognize when assessments reproduce inequality, or when literacy practices are alienating rather than liberating? Technique alone cannot answer these questions; they require cultural, moral, and political clarity.

Most glaring is the absence of any course engaging with the historical and systemic roots of the education crisis. There is no deep engagement with the history of Philippine education—precolonial, colonial, postcolonial to present.

Nowhere is there structured inquiry into how policies and laws have shaped what and how we teach. Where is the critical unpacking of MATATAG, of K to 12, or the contentious implementation of mother tongue-based education? Where is the interrogation of why education is collapsing despite decades of reform?

Equally alarming is the lack of courses that prepare teachers for education as a tool for social transformation. The curriculum fails to cultivate a deeper understanding of how learning shapes—and is shaped by—inequality, ecological degradation, historical distortion and political oppression.

Education is never neutral. It must empower, liberate and foster social justice. Pre-service teachers should be equipped to lead that work. As Paulo Freire asserted in Teachers as Cultural Workers: Those Who Dare Teach, this preparation is essential. Yet this curriculum prepares them only to implement—not interrogate—the system.

There is a critical difference between “learner-centered” and “contextualized” education. The former focuses on individual needs; the latter roots learning in cultural, historical and political realities.

Contextualized education demands engagement with learners’ lived experiences—from urban slums to conflict-ridden zones—and recognizes classrooms as ideological spaces.

Without this grounding, “learner-centered” becomes a Western import stripped of substance. A truly Philippine teacher education must develop awareness of how motivation, values, and learning are shaped by society—local and global.

And herein lies the fatal blind spot of the reframed curriculum: its uncritical embrace of apolitical technicalism. It is obsessed with how to teach, but silent on what and why. It reduces teaching to competencies, evacuating philosophical, historical and political dimensions.

It trains teachers to implement, not to resist or reimagine. In doing so, it sustains a modernized “banking model” of education—structured, technocratic, and devoid of praxis.

This omission mirrors the logic of technocratic governance. For years, the state has treated education as a management issue solvable through retraining and data systems.

It refuses to confront education as a political problem—rooted in underinvestment, policy incoherence, and leadership crises. By framing teacher preparation around competencies, the TEC reinforces the illusion that we can fix education without reckoning with its political foundations.

The result is a curriculum that is orderly but hollow, modern-looking but regressive. It offers no space for critical pedagogy that names oppression and cultivates agency. It treats social reality as static and teaching as ideologically neutral.

It sidelines teacher preparation as public intellectuals, limits training in community engagement, and excludes preparation for resisting authoritarianism or asserting academic freedom. In short, it leaves no space for hope.

Reform must not mean retreat. If we are to reframe teacher education, we must do so with courage—not by sanitizing it of politics, but by embracing its transformative potential.

Education is not merely about schooling—it is about shaping a moral and political identity for the nation. And if teacher preparation fails to produce educators who can read the world as well as the word, we remain trapped in the very system we claim to reform.

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Allen A. Espinosa and Arlyne C. Marasigan are professors at the College of Advanced Studies (CAS) and fellows at the Educational Policy Research and Development Office (EPRDO) of the Philippine Normal University. Nikolee Marie A. Serafico-Reyes is an associate professor at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences and also a fellow at EPRDO. Heidi B. Macahilig is a professor of CAS and the current director of EPRDO. They may be reached at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected], respectively. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the University.