Private Schools Teach Philippine History in English and Call It a Feature
The kids who struggle with both languages get blamed for their grades. The curriculum gets a pass.
By Isabel Castro
Walk into any mid-tier private school in Metro Manila and you'll find a Grade 7 student reading about the Katipunan in English. Next period, she reads about subject-verb agreement, also in English. If she fumbles either one, the report card treats it as her problem.
The curriculum is the problem. Philippine history taught in English is a choice somebody made, and that choice keeps getting renewed every school year without anyone explaining why.
The logic nobody says out loud
Public schools shifted toward mother tongue instruction in the lower grades years ago, with mixed results and ongoing debate. Private schools mostly skipped that conversation. English stayed the default medium from kindergarten through senior high, across almost every subject, including the ones about this country.
The justification given to parents is always the same: English fluency, global competitiveness, college readiness, better job prospects. All of it points outward. None of it explains why a lesson on Rizal needs to happen in the language Rizal wrote his harshest criticisms about.
So you get children memorizing Noli Me Tangere summaries in English, writing book reports in English, answering quiz questions in English, about a novel originally written in Spanish and taught to their grandparents in Tagalog. Three layers of translation before the story even gets to them.
Who pays for the mismatch
The kids who thrive are the ones whose households already run in English. Their parents read to them in English, their yayas were told to speak English, their cartoons were in English. School is an extension of home.
The kids who struggle are the ones code-switching at the dinner table, watching Tagalog teleseryes with their lolas, hearing Bisaya or Ilonggo or Kapampangan in the kitchen. They show up to school and get graded on comprehension in a language their brain has to translate into first. Then they get graded again on grammar in that same language.
When they fall behind, the teacher calls it a reading problem. The parents pay for tutors. Nobody calls it a design problem.
The quiet class sorting
This is how private schools filter without admitting they filter. The entrance exam is in English. The interview is in English. The textbooks are in English. A child from a Taglish household can pass the exam and still spend years feeling slow, because slow is what happens when you're thinking in one language and performing in another.
By high school, the ones who couldn't keep up have transferred out, shifted to public school, or internalized the idea that they're just not academic. Their cousins in the same grade at a barangay public school, learning Araling Panlipunan in Filipino, often know the material better. They just can't perform it in the language the SAT wants.
The bargain that never made sense
Parents pay private school tuition partly because they want their kids to speak English well. Fine. That's an honest transaction for English class, for Science, for Math if you insist.
Philippine history is not a language subject. It's the thing that tells a kid who she is, where her family came from, why her town is named what it is, whose blood is in the soil her school is built on. Teaching that in a borrowed language, then failing the kids who can't keep up, is a tuition receipt for a specific kind of damage.
The fix is not complicated. Teach Kasaysayan in Filipino. Grade it in Filipino. Let English class be English class. Stop charging families 200,000 pesos a year to blame their children for a curriculum choice the school made on their behalf.
