Opening/Closing Remarks-Philip Muncada

 Opening Remarks-Philip Muncada, SVD

Two score and 15 years ago, Our SVD fathers brought forth to this nation, an institution conceived as an instrument to assist SVD schools and dedicated to bring them together to attain their educational objectives with distinction.

Today, we are all gathered here as testimony of that enduring legacy they left us. As of 2024, there 32 institutions affiliated to our retirement fund and about 2,714 employees enrolled in the fund. The first semester, SVD schools serve 50,000 students. However, DWEA has become synonymous to retirement fund.

But DWEA is more than retirement fund. The main purpose of our existence is to provide, using USC slogan “Education with a Mission.” And this we accomplish by giving a holistic education to our students.  Our students should be excellent on 3H…. excellent in their HEADa: Academic excellence: Students with excellent HEARTS. Hearts that are compassionate and virtuous in spite of corrupt surrounding. Students with open HANDS. Hands that give back to the community.  Without these these three H, we will forming students with big heads, but no heart and hand. Our education will turn out to be as C. S. Lewis says: “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

So, 3 H, and these we provide through our Catholic / SVD education. In fact, in spite of higher tuition fees of our schools, parents choose our schools because we provide the PLUS…. The Catholic formation to our students. Our being Catholic is  is the NICHE of our schools. Then we have to make sure that we do offer good and effective Catholic education to our clients/students.

It is in this light that DWEA embarked on a survey about the Catholicity of participating SVD schools. Just how “Catholic” are we? We went to 5 PHN colleges: Vigan, Laoag, Bangued, Dagupan and Urdaneta to find out their strengths and weaknesses.

But what is Catholicity in the first place. I reviewed the literature and found five common denominators of a Catholic school namely:

1 Christian Anthropology; 2. Catholic worldview; 3) Curriculum; 4) Gospel witness and 5) Missionary slant.  I then asked our leaders in PHS to write statements that would indicate whether the statements are present in each category in their particular school. Each statement was scored 1 to 5 with five being fully present, and so on. The results are revealing. Here they are:

1 Curriculum has the weakest score

 What does this mean:

a) There is a need to offer religious and Catholic formation classes/seminars to our faculty and staff.  The faculty and staff have also to be formed.

b) Faculty and staff should know relevant Church teaching and be able to relate the subjects they are teaching.

But we cannot stay on the theoretical level alone, we have to be practical and down to earth that’s why we also have to look into our operations.

This 10th DWEA Assembly will deal on

1. We will look into Catholicity. Catholicity is the foundation of our education offering. This is what distinguishes us from other government schools

2. Baldrige Excellence framework looks into making our processes coherent and effective in bringing out satisfied students. We started our survey with 5 PHN schools and intend to do this with other SVD schools. The results we will echo to these schools.

3. Character formation is of utmost importance.  It is not enough to bring out academically bright students. They should be students with good values honed by our Christian ideals. It is never enough to produce technocrats with no heart and would readily buckle to temptations in the workplace.

4. Networking: We will discuss networking – not only discuss but this whole assembly is an opportunity to network with other SVD institutions to enhance our offerings.

5. Innovations: We will discuss innovation not only in technology but innovations in the education pedagogy. The use of AI is one of them.  Fr. Ben Beltran will have an interesting input in this area.

6. But what are all these efforts will go to waste and in the level of hallucinations if we do not or cannot sustain them. So we will listen to ideas and suggestions towards sustainability of our efforts.

 My dear fellow educators, years from now, most the DWEA members will little note nor remember what transpired here. But all the same, may they reap the fruits of the discussions that transpired here.

Fellow educators: WELCOME to the 10th DWEA Assembly