Bernardo Caslib, Jr.

This project examines the critical reorientation toward gender in Philippine education and philosophy, situated at the intersection of institutional consolidation and critical inquiry. Drawing on domestic legislative mandates, such as the Magna Carta of Women and Gender and Development (GAD) frameworks, and global benchmarks like Sustainable Development Goal 5, it critically interrogates the paradoxical terrain where high global gender parity rankings coexist with persistent structural inequalities, epistemic marginalization, and symbolic erasure. Moving beyond procedural compliance and tokenistic quantitative metrics, the collection evaluates whether gender mainstreaming achieves substantive epistemic justice or succumbs to administrative domestication. The contributions span diverse domains, including basic and higher education, health care curricula, indigenous and decolonial feminist epistemologies, critical masculinities, and canonical revisions of Filipino philosophy. Finally, the project argues for a reflexive, contextually situated, and globally conversant philosophy of education that moves beyond merely mainstreaming gender to allowing gendered critique to transform the ethical, epistemic, and pedagogical foundations of education and philosophy themselves.

In this paper, I argue that love, specifically Thomas Aquinas’ notion of caritas, can be taught by employing experience-based learning. I attempt to present a strategy that I’ve employed in my own classes in a university in the Philippines: by taking students to an institution for abandoned elderly, lessons in class are concretized in a real-world situation. Composed of three steps: meaning making, paradigm-shifting and self-understanding, Provenzo’s road map of learning was followed. This was implemented through classroom discussion, immersion, and writing reflections, respectively. Using my students’ statements on things they have learned throughout the process, I have proved that this technique effectively bridged a 13th century concept with a concern that this generation is in need of fuller understanding, love.