Abstract

Perhaps, the greatest challenge that modern education and its institutions face today is its indictment as a modern slave factory. Fueled by a scientific and techno-capitalist rationality, modern education has become complicit with the production of happy slaves by its unwitting acquiescence to the demands of the international labor market and its inability to combat the manifold alienation, dehumanization, oppression and suffering of the world's poor and suffering majority. In the Philippine context, nowhere is this complicity more pronounced than in the introduction of the K-12 education. Designed to transform Filipinos into a competent workforce ready to be fed into the world's techno-capitalist market, the K-12 signals both the promise and the perils of a nationalist socio-political ideology intent not at human emancipation but on the continual fetishism of a consumerist-materialistic way of life that ultimately engulfs everyone within the anxiety and essential homelessness occasioned by modern technological enframing. In the face of the absurd, finding one's freedom is the only task worth pursuing in the end times.