A bill filed July 9, 2025 in the Philippine House of Representatives would require young students to learn what China has been up to in the West Philippine Sea. If the bill becomes law, it would expand what’s already being done in Philippine classrooms to convey the history of China’s incessant gray-zone attacks.
Lessons on the West Philippine Sea—the part of the South China Sea that falls within the Philippines’s exclusive economic zone—are already taught across multiple levels under the Department of Education’s Matatag, or K to 10, curriculum.
But what House Bill 1625 wants is for all public and private schools to be legally required to teach elementary and high school students the history and legal basis of the Philippines’ jurisdiction over the West Philippine Sea….
China has persistently deployed maritime militia, Navy and Coast Guard vessels within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and constructed military facilities on reefs within the Philippine continental shelf. Filipino fisherfolk and sailors have also continued to face harassment and are denied access to their traditional fishing grounds.
The goal of the legislation is to establish what the bill calls a “sustained effort to build awareness and civic responsibility, especially among the youth,” an effort that “will ensure that students fully understand the significance of the [Permanent Court of Arbitration] ruling, the Philippines’ right to protect its territorial jurisdiction, and the implications of China’s refusal to recognize the ruling.”
If these aspirations are achieved, the students will end up knowing more than Chinese Communist Party spokesmen profess to know whenever they rationalize China’s latest ramming or water-cannoning of Philippine vessels.
Graduates will be able to make corrections like the one recently issued by Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, Jr., in response to a reporter’s stuporous question about whether President Trump’s style had encouraged China’s belligerence in the South China Sea.
“The aggressiveness of China has been several years in the making. China’s design for the region does not depend on any American leader. It depends on its own plan of action in the region, its own expansionist activities, its own need to control the area.”
