The high price of 'free education'
There is perhaps no greater national lie than the promise of “free education.” The Constitution enshrines it as a right and politicians routinely weaponize it as a talking point. But anyone who has stepped inside a leaking public classroom, sat through a Zoom class powered by borrowed mobile data, or tried to teach with photocopied modules that crumble in a week knows the painful truth: there is no such thing as free education in the Philippines—only different ways of paying for its failures.
And the costs are staggering.
The illusion shatters quickly when one looks at the actual state of Philippine schools. For millions of learners, “free” means learning under collapsing roofs, sharing textbooks that arrive late or not at all, and crowding 50 to 70 students into rooms built for 30. It means children in remote communities crossing rivers and walking for hours to reach makeshift classrooms, only to be taught by a single teacher handling six grade levels. These are not isolated anecdotes. They are the daily geography of inequality, carved into our school system by decades of neglect.
Yet physical decay is only the surface symptom of a deeper, more devastating crisis. Corruption remains a structural feature of the education bureaucracy. Every overpriced chair and board, ghost-delivered textbook, or substandard classroom and building is not merely a financial crime—it is a stolen future.
Billions lost to scams and misallocated budgets are billions withheld from children who need safe classrooms, teachers who need training, and learners whose lives depend on literacy. In the Philippines, graft is not an abstract governance issue; it is a parallel curriculum teaching our youth that the system is rigged and their aspirations negotiable.
Equally destructive is the leadership crisis that has defined education policy for decades. We have endured a cycle of reforms introduced or reintroduced without adequate preparation, implemented without actual support and abandoned without accountability.
K to 12's promise of global competitiveness collapsed under the weight of overcrowded classrooms, unprepared teachers and nonexistent learning materials. The pandemic-era shift to distance learning magnified the digital divide so brutally that millions of students simply dropped out of learning altogether. The system did not adapt; it improvised—and Filipino learners paid the price.
EDCOM II’s reports now confirm what teachers and parents have long known: the education system is in “multi-system organ failure.” Learning poverty is catastrophic, with most ten-year-olds unable to read a simple text, issues from Batanes to Tawi-tawi, not secluded to rural learners, yet even for the learners in urban slum areas.
Governance is fractured among DepEd, CHED and TESDA—three bureaucracies working in silos, producing duplication, inefficiencies, and a complete breakdown in learner progression. It is a system so internally incoherent that reform feels structurally impossible. Teachers are drowning in administrative tasks, deployed without regard to specialization, and denied meaningful professional support.
This education crisis is producing a “waste” generation, metaphorically referring to what is wasted, neglected, or rendered unusable as a result of systemic educational failure, thereby stealing the future of Filipino learners.
But the most damning cost of this crisis is not administrative—it is existential. Ignorance has become normalized, not as a personal failing but as a predictable outcome of structural design. The child who cannot compute change in a sari-sari store after years in school, the out-of-school youth lured into extremism, the graduate unprepared for basic workplace tasks—these are not anomalies. They are products of a system that has quietly abandoned them.
And so families do what families must: they pay to escape. The soaring cost of private education—tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per year—is not merely tuition. It is a national ransom.
Parents are paying for safety, stability, functioning laboratories, qualified teachers and reliable internet. They are paying to opt out of the dysfunction. And every family that exits the public system drains it of political pressure, advocacy, and middle-class urgency. What remains is an apartheid of learning: well-funded private schools producing competence for the few, and an anemic public system manufacturing learning poverty for the many.
This is the real price of “free” education: a country where opportunity is sold to those who can afford it, and withheld from those who cannot. A society where your future is determined not by talent or hard work, but by your parents’ ability to pay. The promise of education as the great equalizer is dead; what exists now is a marketplace of futures, stratified by wealth.
Fixing this requires more than budget increases or another cycle of superficial reforms. It demands political will and courage—an all-out war on corruption, a governance overhaul that ends the bureaucratic fragmentation, a nationwide reconstruction of school infrastructure, and a reinvestment in teachers as professionals rather than functionaries. It requires leaders who will treat education not as a talking point and a wicked problem but as a matter of national survival.
A generation is already waiting. Their classrooms are crumbling, their teachers exhausted, their future compromised. The question is not whether we can afford to act. The question is whether we can survive if we do not. Ad infinitum, free education is at risk.
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Nilo Jayoma Castulo ([email protected]) is a professor at the Department of Educational Leadership and Professional Services, College of Education, Mindanao State University - Tawi-Tawi College of Technology and Oceanography. Arlyne C. Marasigan ([email protected]) is a professor at the College of Advanced Studies (CAS) and a fellow at the Educational Policy Research and Development Office (EPRDO). Levi E. Elipane ([email protected]) is a professor and deputy dean of CAS. Nikolee Marie A Serafico-Reyes ([email protected]) is an associate professor at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences and a fellow at EPRDO. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Philippine Normal University and the Mindanao State University - Tawi-Tawi College of Technology and Oceanography.
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