One of the trickiest things to figure out when we arrived in the Philippines was where to send the kids for school. We already knew, based on our research and anecdotes from friends that options would be extremely slim in Bacolod. Our choices were public school or religious private schools (most private schools are non-secular.) 

Before we left the US, we tried to prepare the kids for what to expect – the uniforms, the religious overtones, the teacher-has-the-last-say style of teaching, etc….Basically Drew and I were like, it’s gonna be hella different from public school in Berkeley, but that’s all a part of the experience. Anais was excited about the uniforms and Basi was, well, if you know Basi, he was true to his go-with-the-flow self.

What we didn’t expect was that our kids would be learning how to be non-questioning, Christian White Supremacists in the Philippines.

OK, so maybe I’m being a little over-dramatic, perhaps over-politicizing our experience a bit much….but no, truth is, we ended up in a hyper evangelical, right-wing Christian school promoting apartheid, sexism and promoting creationism as science….ummmmm, no thank you. And this shouldn’t be a surprise for any of us, but the school’s curriculum comes from the United States, of course!

How and why did we end up in such a school, you might be asking? When we arrived in the Philippines the school year was almost ⅔ of the way complete, none of the schools we preferred would accept the kids so late in the school year. But this school (I’m just gonna call it the CWSS – Christian White Supremacy School for now) would accept the kids.

On our visits the administration and teachers seemed nice enough. The class size was small, about 15 kids per class with two adult “supervisors” they called them. The school facility was ok by Philippine standards. We’d visited other schools where they had 20 kids in smallish windowless rooms. The CWSS called themselves an international school using curriculum from the US. 

The curriculum uses workbooks called PACES. Each child had a cubicle and works on their PACES individually. When I asked about their curriculum, they couldn’t, or wouldn’t divulge much about it. This was a red flag for us, but being anxious to get the kids integrated into a local school we put our aprensions aside and went with it. We knew then it wouldn’t be an ideal school but we considered it as a temporary solution until the new school year began. 

But after the second day, Basi was clearly unhappy. He had to sit through a one hour sermon on sin and their science curriculum was questionable. He reported to us that they didn’t believe in evolution. 

Here are a few pictures of the PACE workbooks they were given. The Bible and Christianity permeate through ALL of their subjects, English, Math, Science, Social Studies, etc. They teach science from a creationist viewpoint, basically that God created life and the theory of evolution is in conflict with this viewpoint. In other workbooks, they teach the kids that the Loch Ness monster was a real creature and that we humans lived along dinosaurs.

Upon deeper research into the curriculum, turns out the School of Tomorrow Philippines gets all of their educational materials, including these PACE workbooks from Accelerated Christian Education one of the most popular and idealogically extreme Christian textbook companies in the US.  It’s basically evangelical, bible-based education, the kind that Ben Carson and Betsy Devos  promote in the United States. This curriculum is being used in over 400 schools throughout the Philippines and is approved by the Philippine Department of Education. 

I can’t help but think that this bible-based education contributes to a deep conservatism. One that creates