EDUCATION Secretary Leonor Briones yesterday said the current leadership of the agency should not be blamed for what its critics said was an education crisis in the wake of the failure of several teenage contestants in a television show to correctly answer questions on the country’s history.
Briones said they are only implementing the curriculum that was passed on to them by the previous leaders of the agency.
Briones made the remarks when she was asked in a press briefing about the now viral video from the reality show Pinoy Big Brother where several contestants failed to give the common name for the three priests martyred during the Spanish colonial rule, namely, Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora. The three are known in history books as “Gomburza.”
Instead, one of the contestants answered “MaJoHa.” The contestants also failed to correctly answer what is the country’s longest bridge, instead pointing to “SLEX” or South Luzon Expressway.
The booboos elicited concerns and calls from different sectors for the DepEd to initiate reforms in the education sector to address such deficiency and to bring back Philippine History in junior and senior high schools. Philippine History was removed from the core curriculum in 2014 under the K to 12 program.
