Gina A. Opiniano

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.

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose (and do not categorise under forced headings) diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience.

One major aspect of interest in Filipino philosophy is education. Reflecting on the nature, aims, and problems of education, Filipino philosophy of education investigates philosophical issues and emerging trends of philosophical thinking in education which are distinctive to the Filipino context. Filipino philosophy of education has a rich potential that encompasses revisiting cultural and historical narratives, considering inclusivity, reevaluating the educational system, challenging existing pedagogies, and re-discovering indigeneity. In this context it is worth exploring it further. Taking off from a collective work on Filipino philosophy of education by a group of Filipino scholars, this special issue provides a more elaborate discussion of major aspects of Filipino philosophy providing traction on the conversation that which furthers the truth of the existence of Filipino Philosophy, its nuances, and its relevance to education. More specifically, this special issue provides philosophical and theoretical reflections that bring to the fore the state of Filipino philosophy of education and discussions about the nature of Filipino cultural, political, and intellectual heritage. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy of education in the Philippines and globally.