Like BBL, K-12 is K-9
(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 05-13-2015 WED)
The BangsaMoro Basic Law (BBL) is now being driven by the BS Aquino government and its factotums into a “last two minutes” fast break pass and dunk. They even tried to pass it in Congress by executive session or secret balloting, hoping to close the process from public view.
Those scums surely know that the nation does not want the BBL and they are only pressing it because their “real bosses”--the US and its cohorts, Malaysia, Britain, EU, Japan, et al.--demand it. If they have to, they’ll ram the BBL through more dead Filipino bodies even after the SAF (Special Action Forces) 44 massacre.
The same is true for the K-12 education “reform” of BS Aquino and his cohorts. They want to lengthen the educational process for basic education from 10 years to 12 years with nary a thought about the adverse impact on the people (running up to billions of pesos in income losses for parents, teachers, and schools) nor about the absurdity of their own argument that K-12 will improve job prospects abroad for Filipinos given that (a) exporting labor shouldn’t be any right thinking government’s policy and (b) the huge number of OFWs--10 million--shows Filipino workers are incontrovertibly in demand even without K-12.
The K-12 is similar to the BBL in that it is an imposition from Western foreign interests. While the BBL stems from the geopolitical and economic interest of the US, the K-12 is an imposition of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, financial institutions that promote the economic and cultural aspects of the Western powers’ strategic target. This foreign plan is called Globalization and the Philippines has been its most beguiled victim since the US reinstalled its controlled, local, neocolonial economic-administrative Filipino elite since Edsa I.
The BBL and the K-12 are K-9 or canine (“tuta”) operations for and in behalf of foreign interests. They are both facing strong-willed resistance from the people because they have caused or have threatened to cause massive and irreparable harm to our people. The BBL has caused a decade of misery in Mindanao and to our men in uniform trying to contain the havoc that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has been creating to justify their “peace deal,” the K-12 is now threatening economic and emotional havoc on hundreds of thousands of Filipino families that it will irresponsibly dislocate.
Last year I interviewed “Suspend K-12 Coalition” convenor Prof. Rene Luis Tadle. Last week he led an impressive coalition of organizations from the progressive Left such as ACT (Alliance of Concerned Teachers) to the progressive centrist Magdalo Party-list (providing the facilities), from the Silliman University Faculty Association to the Holy Angels University Teachers and Employees Union, and 40 other organizations in a mass protest against the K-12 at the Liwasang Bonficacio, with 6,000 teachers, students, parents, and families braving the punishing afternoon heat. This is what they said:
“Every year, we confront the perennial problems of access, availability and quality of education resources and infrastructure. The impact of government neglect… are both appalling and alarming: high teacher-student ratio, overworked teachers… on measly salaries, high entrance rate but low completion rate, high drop-outs rates, high repetition rates, and high number of multi-grade classrooms …. Stray teachers and distorted learning experiences. The problems besetting Philippine education are systemic, and we assert that the K-12 Law will only worsen the persistent crises…
“We remain steadfast in our conviction that the K-12 Law violates our Constitutional rights to labor, property and academic freedom. In 2016, teaching and non-teaching personnel stand to lose their job security and benefits, and risk being victims of unjust labor practices. We assail the inability of education officials to present viable solutions to the labor implications of the K-12 Law. We deplore government’s failure to substantially respond to our petition for Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against K-12 Law now before the Supreme Court en banc…”
The latest action of the government on the K-12 controversy is to get the League of Mayors under Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista to buy full-page ads to publish its support for the K-12 program. What does a comedian-Mayor and the cabal of mostly corrupt local officials know of the essentials of a good educational system in the midst of a world suffering the destructive repercussions of the IMF-WB’s capitalist globalization (see The Great Failure of Globalization, by Jeffrey Sachs, Commentary, Financial Times, 2011)?
Globalization is the plot called the Washington Consensus drawn up by the US as it became the sole superpower in the 1980s. It aims to monopolize the world’s power and wealth by dismantling nation-states (especially the Third World) to let US corporations take over via trade and financial liberalization and the privatization of state assets and functions. It is no surprise that Philippine education is being deprived of its Philippine history component by the K-12 “reforms,” and public school students are being channeled to private schools (with a known oligarch getting into high school education business!).
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