President Marcos bared that one of his directives to incoming Education Secretary Sonny Angara is to ensure the welfare of teachers in order for them to focus on teaching.
"[T]he key to any successful program in the DepEd (Department of Education) are the teachers so I said we have to take care of the teachers," Marcos said in an interview at the sidelines of distribution of government assistance in Sulu on Friday, July 5.
The effort, Marcos said, includes ensuring that they are financially taken care of.
"[O]f course financial, to make sure that they can feed their families, we tend to forget sometimes that teachers have families. We see them just as teachers. They have families, they have to take care of their family, and they cannot teach properly kung inaalala nila yung lagay ng pamilya nila (if they are thinking about their family)so we have to make sure that they are in a good place so that the teachers can concentrate on actual teaching," Marcos explained.
The President also told Angara to retrain teachers, stressing that they must be retrained to adjust to the constant changes in teaching, especially in the advent of technological development.
"The other part of it is the retraining because ang bilis, we all know, ang bilis ng development lalo na sa technology na within one year obsolete na, within two years obsolete na kaya kailangan turuan natin ulit (development is so fast, especially in technology that within one or two years it's obsolete, so we need to train them again) so that's what w e will do," he said.
Marcos also tasked Angara to teach Philippine history in schools, citing the limited history topics in workbooks.
READ MORE: Teach Philippine history, Marcos tells incoming DepEd chief