The politics of “educating” the Philippine technocratic elite

The literature on technocracy generally highlights the importance of its educational background and the consequent technical expertise it has acquired to serve an expanding and industrializing society. This has enabled it to obtain crucial positions in government and, more importantly, it has thrust technocracy into a power bloc of its own in its respective societies. In the Philippine experience, this is also true but only to a certain extent. This article, which uses the Marxist political economy framework, will show that what is more significant is not its educational background per se but the manner in which this has been shaped by the United States (US) in collusion with the country’s politico-economic elites. In particular, its educational expertise was nurtured within the context of US geopolitical and economic interests in the region during the Cold War period. Technical expertise was expected to bring forth development that would be a bulwark against any form of insurgencies. Thus, technocracy’s educational training would be used for the perpetuation of a capitalist ideology that would liberalize the economy, favor foreign investors, and be biased toward an export-oriented industrialization policy. This would be in tune with a faction of the country’s elite that was expanding and would service or enter into joint ventures with US multinational corporations. More importantly, it would ultimately serve the interests of the state, which shared this same development perspective.