Wi-Fi for All, Wisdom for None: DepEd’s Digital Dream Drowns in Reality

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — July 15, 2025

The Grand Illusion

Behold the magnificent educational utopia that the Department of Education’s (DepEd) latest policy announcements will surely deliver!! By the end of 2025, every one of the 47,000 public schools will bask in the glow of Wi-Fi—a digital utopia delivered with the breezy confidence of past government miracles, like eradicating poverty by next Tuesday or fixing Manila’s traffic by lunchtime. It’s audacious, isn’t it? A nation where children in crumbling classrooms, sans electricity or running water, will suddenly Zoom their way to academic glory.

Yet, the absurdity festers beneath the rhetoric. Many schools lack:

Roofs that don’t leak during monsoons.
Textbooks less than a decade old.
Teachers who aren’t unpaid martyrs propping up a collapsing system.

DepEd’s vision is a cathedral built on quicksand—a glittering mirage distracting from the rot of a system that fails its most vulnerable.

The Digital Mirage

Consider Bay-ang National High School in Iloilo, now basking in free Wi-Fi, hailed as a DepEd triumph. School head Harence Cacho gushes that teachers no longer trek to internet cafés for webinars or reports. Splendid! But zoom out, and the picture darkens.

DepEd’s own data reveals a grim truth: 80% of Filipino students can’t read at grade level (PDF), a crisis predating and persisting through the digital age. Education Secretary Sonny Angara declares, “We cannot improve education without the internet,” as if YouTube tutorials will teach a child in Zamboanga to parse a sentence when their school shares one solar-powered tablet among 50 kids, often in monsoon season.

This is techno-optimism on steroids—serving caviar on a trash heap and calling it a feast. The National Fiber Backbone (NFB) Phases 2 and 3, launched with fanfare in Leyte, promise “game-changing” connectivity. Yet, the math doesn’t inspire:

47,000 schools.
18 months.
A bureaucracy notorious for moving at the pace of a carabao in mud.

The Digital Bayanihan Project’s initial rollout—113,000 SIM cards for students and 3,800 for teachers—sounds generous until you realize it’s a drop in the bucket for 20 million learners. It’s a classic PR sleight of hand: spotlight the shiny pilot while millions languish in digital darkness.

The Poor as Props

DepEd’s rhetoric drips with compassion, promising “digital inclusion” that “embodies” care for the marginalized. How noble! But who’s really being served? The rural students stuck with one bar of signal or the telecom oligarchs salivating over juicy public-private partnership (PPP) contracts?

The Bayanihan SIM Program, distributing free data to a mere 357 schools, is less a lifeline than a photo-op—a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Meanwhile, the PPP for School Infrastructure Project for Digitalization, slated to deliver devices and satellite internet by late 2026, feels like a promise written in vanishing ink.

Ground reports paint a grimmer picture: in some schools, NFB fiber cables double as clotheslines, a bitter metaphor for infrastructure that looks good on paper but fails the poor it claims to uplift.

The government’s digital evangelism sidesteps a brutal truth: connectivity alone doesn’t educate. Without devices, electricity, or trained teachers, Wi-Fi is as useful as a lighthouse in a desert. Yet DepEd’s press releases brim with self-congratulation, as if a router in every school equals a revolution in learning. It’s poverty-washing with a high-tech sheen, using the dreams of rural kids as props for political points.

The Inevitable Betrayal

How will this grand experiment end? Predictably. Urban showcase schools, already flush with resources, will stream 4K educational videos while remote classrooms in Mindanao “connect” to a 1998 dial-up modem—if they’re lucky.

The real scandal isn’t the timeline’s ambition but what’s missing:

No comprehensive plan for teacher training.
No budget for universal student devices.
No strategy to electrify schools still reliant on candles or solar panels that barely power a bulb.

DepEd’s data shows thousands of schools lack basic infrastructure—yet the department dares to sell Wi-Fi as salvation. This isn’t digital inclusion; it’s a Wi-Fi sticker slapped on systemic neglect, a cruel tease for children already betrayed by a broken system.

Barok’s Call to Arms

The internet won’t save Filipino kids—but books, teachers, and accountability might. DepEd’s plan could be a step forward, but only if it stops hiding behind hashtags and confronts reality.

Demand transparency: publish every peso spent, every school connected, every contract signed. Roll out connectivity in phases, prioritizing the most remote schools, not just those near a press conference. Invest in teachers—train them to wield digital tools effectively, not just to log into Zoom. Ensure every child has a device and a power source before boasting about “universal access.”

Above all, wage a real war on corruption, not just a digital one. No amount of bandwidth can fix a system that lets telecom tycoons feast while students starve for opportunity.

The kids deserve better than a Wi-Fi sticker—they deserve a future.

Key References

Manila Bulletin, 2025: DepEd, DICT boost internet access drive for all public schools by 2025 – News report detailing DepEd’s 2025 connectivity plan and the National Fiber Backbone launch.
National Fiber Backbone (NFB) Program – Department of Information and Communications Technology overview of the NFB infrastructure project.
Digital Bayanihan Project and Bayanihan SIM Program – DepEd’s official page on the SIM card distribution and digital inclusion initiatives (placeholder; specific URL unavailable in provided materials).
Philippine Public-Private Partnership Program – Overview of PPP projects, including those for school infrastructure digitalization.
DepEd National Achievement Test 2023 Report (PDF) – Data showing 80% of students below grade-level reading proficiency.
Ground Reports on Rural School Infrastructure Challenges (PDF) – Article highlighting misuse of NFB cables and infrastructure gaps.
Solar-Powered Schools in the Philippines – Report on schools relying on limited solar power for electricity.