Political Socialization in the Philippines: Learning about Democracy 237 socialization of democratic citizenship attitudes and behaviors. Given good pedagogy and course content, with full attention and participation by the student, these values, beliefs and behaviors should be effectively transmitted. Unfortunately, learning conditions are rarely perfect and many good intentions remain just that. And assuming these work, whether these have any impact on long-term democratic citizenship values and behavior is to be seen, as most post-course exit evaluations by academic institutions are unable to capture such effects since they can only focus on the self reports of perceived immediate gains. The general education curriculum of tertiary education also requires the student to take courses on Philippine history and on the life and works of Jose Rizal, our national hero. The intuitive rationale would be that exposure to one's history and heroes would lead to a deeper appreciation of one's country and lead to better citizenship behaviors. These courses are perceived by many students, however, as annoyances that one has to get through to graduate, in part due to dull, uninspired teachers. Any learning from these classes are hardly internalized and easily forgotten, based on data from a long-term project with a series of studies on history ad identity (Liu & Gastardo-Conaco, 2011). In the rst study conducted in the mid-1990s, students were asked to list events and gures from Philippine history deemed very important and the basis for their choices. Respondents had difculty responding to these questions and responses focused mainly on top-of-the-mind recent historical events largely played up in media. The top event identied by 67% of respondents was the EDSA People Power Revolution of 1986. The second event with 49% nominations was the declaration of martial law in 1972, followed by a set of events loosely categorized as Spanish era related (41% nominations). In terms of important historical gure, Jose Rizal was the clear winner with 90% nominations, perhaps an outcome of his salience in the two history courses required in the tertiary general education curriculum. But what contributions these additional historical knowledge make to political socialization (and leading to political behaviors), other than a awed recall of dry facts and gures, is unclear. Nevertheless, there is great faith in the power of the educational system as a socializing agent, whether via manifest or latent socialization. Realizing this, government has tried to harness this power by designing curricula and content that could more rationally direct this transmission process. Unfortunately, designed content, structure and process lter through both teachers and learners and impact is highly dependent on the skills levels and abilities of these two groups. Thus the need for teacher training, not just in terms of teaching pedagogy but also in terms of values formation as values espoused by the teacher are implicitly transmitted to the students. Curricula and course content also have to be designed in recognition of learners' ability thresholds, interest and attention levels. A discussion of abstract political constructs might be better suited to older, more cognitively developed and more socially-