World Education Day: Have We Learned Anything at All?

Opinion

January 24 is marked globally as World Education Day—a day meant to celebrate learning as a human right and a foundation for sustainable development.

But in the Philippines today, celebration feels premature.

As communities continue to grieve lives lost to floods, landslides, storms, and environmental disasters, a harder question confronts us:
Have we learned anything from what keeps happening to us?

Just days ago, a landfill landslide in Cebu once again exposed how environmental neglect, weak regulation, and governance failures can turn preventable risks into deadly disasters. It joins a long list of tragedies across the country— communities drown by floods, villages buried under mud, coastal villages erased by storm surges, upland settlements collapsing under denuded slopes.

These are not “natural” disasters alone.
They are the result of decisions made—and laws left unenforced.

A Country Rich in Laws, Poor in Enforcement

The Philippines is not lacking in environmental and social protection laws. In fact, it is often praised for having some of the most comprehensive legal frameworks in the region.

Among them:

• The Philippine Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) System (Presidential Decree No. 1586), requiring environmental impact assessments for risky projects
• The Ecological Solid Waste Management Act (RA 9003), mandating safe, sanitary waste disposal and prohibiting open dumps
• The Clean Water Act (RA 9275) and Clean Air Act (RA 8749)
• The Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (RA 8371), recognizing ancestral land rights and the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent
• The Climate Change Act (RA 9729) and Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act (RA 10121), which require preparedness, prevention, and risk reduction—not just response

Even the Philippine Mining Act (RA 7942) itself recognizes areas where mining is prohibited. In Palawan, this protection is further strengthened by the Strategic Environmental Plan (SEP) Law (RA 7611), which establishes a higher, ecology-based standard for land and resource use. And yet...

On paper, these laws should protect communities long before disaster strikes.

So we must ask:

Were these laws enforced?
Were warnings ignored?
Were communities heard?

Education Is Not Just About Schools

World Education Day should push us to rethink what education really means.

Education is not only about classrooms, diplomas, or literacy rates. It is also about:

• learning from past mistakes
• understanding how power, policy, and profit shape risk
• knowing our rights—and demanding accountability

If communities repeatedly suffer the same harms, it is not because people failed to learn.
It is because those in power failed to act on what we already know.

Communities often know the dangers first. Fisherfolk see coastlines erode. Farmers watch slopes weaken. Urban poor families live beside dumpsites, waterways, and danger zones—not by choice, but by necessity. Their lived knowledge is a form of education too, yet it is routinely dismissed.

The Real Test of Learning Is Governance

If we truly learned from past disasters, we would see:

• safer land use decisions
• functioning waste management systems
• strict regulation of environmentally risky projects
• meaningful participation of affected communities
• accountability when laws are violated

Instead, we see a pattern: tragedy, outrage, investigation, then silence—until the next disaster.

World Education Day should therefore be a moment of collective reflection, not self-congratulation.

A Call to Learn—and Act

Education without action is empty.
Laws without enforcement are hollow.
And remembrance without reform dishonors those who paid the price.

On this World Education Day, let us ask not how much we know—but what we have done with what we know.

Because learning, at its most meaningful, is measured not by words or laws passed, but by lives protected, communities heard, and harm prevented.