f you believe in the importance of education and subscribe to the notion that an educated individual is always likely to behave in a proper and righteous manner, then you cannot help but feel dismayed by what seems to be education's utter failure in the Philippines.

The country is today a place where bribery and corruption seem to have worked their way into every nook and cranny of society. Money it seems is the only thing that matters to Filipinos. The rich use it to get their way, while the poor are happy to sell their souls for whatever they can get for it.

Over the years the situation seems to have steadily deteriorated due to what many believe are inherently bad traits of Filipinos who are: envious, parochial, indolent, lacking morals, and so on. Those are but a few of the negative traits Filipinos routinely heap on each other.

However, it must be pointed out that negative traits can eventually be corrected by an education system that reinforces the good and deemphasizes the bad. After all, isn't that the essence what an 'educated' person is: a civilized individual who has learned to subdue his baser traits while accentuating his higher, more noble ones?

From that perspective, Philippine education is a failure. Both public and private schools have simply been churning out 'rudderless' graduates  who have caused the Philippines to go from first to last in Southeast Asia over a period of six decades.

Thus, it would be difficult for one to argue that education in the Philippines has been anything but an abject failure. And it will remain a failure until it begins to 'remake' Filipinos into that educated ideal they always should have been.