The IMF projects Philippine inflation to hit 4.3% in 2026 — which means money sitting in a savings account is quietly losing value every single day. The logical response is to invest. The problem? Most Filipino students graduate with no idea how to actually do that, and the curriculum is a big reason why.
Under DepEd's current Senior High School framework, "financial education" means solving for compound interest in General Mathematics. That's arithmetic, not investing. The only tracks that get anything beyond that are ABM students — who learn corporate finance, not personal investing. If you graduated from STEM, Humss, or TVL, the curriculum gave you nothing. No framework for reading a financial product, no way to tell whether something is a legitimate investment or just dressed up like one.
And that gap has a real cost. A legitimate investment, by definition, must offer safety of principal and an adequate return after thorough analysis. Anything that doesn't meet that standard isn't an investment — it's speculation. That distinction isn't hard to teach, but it's also not taught. So when a young person opens their phone and the algorithm serves them a platform with charts, portfolio dashboards, and someone their age showing off 100x returns, they have no filter. They don't feel reckless. They feel like they're finally being responsible.
The platform looks like investing. It isn't. They lose the money. And then — this is the part that compounds — they don't try again. Not at 22, not at 30. The account that inflation is quietly eating stays untouched because the one time they did something about it, the market took from them and no one had given them the tools to understand why. Research shows most Filipinos enter these markets to supplement income, not out of reckless appetite. The motivation is right. The preparation is missing.
Other countries have already made the correction. Japan and the United States both mandated standalone personal finance courses for all high school students specifically because markets became accessible to young people before the curriculum caught up. The World Bank and OECD explicitly recommend integrating investment literacy into national core curricula — not strand-specific electives — as standard policy. The Philippines isn't an exception to that recommendation. It's one of the more exposed cases.
DepEd needs to amend the Strengthened SHS Curriculum to make personal investing a mandatory standalone subject across all tracks. Not folded into General Mathematics. Not locked inside ABM. Every student — regardless of strand — is going to face inflation, access to speculative platforms, and financial decisions with real consequences. The curriculum should meet them there before the market does.
Boris L.
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