Role of education in the concept of the “New Society” of the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (1972-1982)

Russian historiography pays considerable attention to the economic and political modernization of the life of the Philippine archipelago, starting from the time of Spaniards, then, American colonization and ending with the era of independence. However, the educational policy on which, on the one hand, the successes of the political and socio-economic modernization of the Philippines have been based throughout the country’s history, and on the other, which by the beginning of the 21st century has become a serious obstacle to economic independence and the establishment of national self-identity, are undeservedly ignored by domestic researchers. The author of this article in previous works has already made attempts to identify the features of the educational policy of Spaniards and Americans in the Philippines, as well as of the independent Philippine governments in the first decades after the end of World War II. But no less interesting is the era of the authoritarian regime of the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1982). Analyzing a wide range of foreign literature and relying on presidential decrees and testimonies of contemporaries as sources, the author comes to the conclusion that the educational policy of the Marcos era is ambiguous: on the one hand, it has become an effective tool to combat country’s main social - economic problems in the 1970s - the problem of unemployment. On the other hand, in the early 1980s it led to its aggravation and marked the beginning of the mass labor migration of Filipinos, which continues to this day. Political decisions made on issues such as the language of instruction, the introduction of a national entrance exam in colleges and universities, and the publication of new textbooks have become critical levers in the deployment of education in support of the labor export strategy in the Marcos era.