From Philippines Congressman Mong Palatino…

Thanks to @kabataancrew for helping me draft this speech. Delivered on November 30. My second privilege speech in the 15th Congress; my 5th as a legislator.

Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, a pleasant afternoon.

I rise today to talk about the just demand of our public universities for a higher share in our national budget. I will also discuss the problems plaguing our country’s education system and why the government needs to rethink its education policies.

Today we are commemorating the birth anniversary of Andres Bonifacio, one of the country’s national heroes and without doubt the most popular working-class icon in our history.

The best way to honor the memory of Bonifacio is to continue his revolutionary dreams. And today, while it is truly depressing that the conditions of the poor during Bonifacio’s time and our time have not significantly improved, it is also worthy to mention that Bonifacio’s militancy continues to inspire countless Filipinos, many of them young. And like Bonifacio, today’s young idealists rely on the collective wisdom and power of the oppressed to build a better and more humane and progressive society.

I wish to cite the campus strikes initiated by students in our public universities as a good example of how our youth are reliving the legacy left behind by Bonifacio. We are all familiar with the issue of the decreasing subsidies allocated by the national government to our state universities and I do not wish to repeat the arguments already raised when we tackled the national budget during the committee and plenary deliberations. But I wish to thank our colleagues, those who supported and signed the manifesto urging the government to increase the budget for education.

The reason why students continue to protest is to convince the senate, which is expected to pass the General Appropriations Act bill this week, to make significant amendments in the budget; in particular, restore the slashed MOOE funding of state universities and provide some Capital Outlay to deserving schools. This appeal, I think, is very relevant, doable, and reasonable.

But tomorrow’s campus protests will be different. For the first time in Philippine history, students, teachers, school personnel and university officials will hold a united stand in their respective campuses nationwide. Political bickering inside schools will be set aside for the meantime so that the public higher education sector will speak as one voice tomorrow. There will be various symbolic activities to be staged at lunch time: some will hold prayer rallies, others will conduct campus strikes, student rallyists will troop to the senate. It is hoped that our senators will listen to the collective sentiments of our education stakeholders. It is also hoped that Malacanang will change its hardline position on the issue and begin to review the negative impact of the current higher education policy of the government.

I want to emphasize the last point I made because it is a fundamental issue from the perspective of students. Our students are protesting not merely to beg for a few crumbs from the state; they want President Noynoy Aquino to reject the policy of reducing the role of government in providing higher education services to our youth. They want the president to draft a new higher education roadmap. An education program that does not subscribe to the misguided doctrine that higher education should not be shouldered by the state.

If only Malacanang will review some of the global news stories this year, it will be able to discern that Filipino student protesters are not alone in their demand for greater state subsidy for higher education. For the past few months, we have witnessed massive student protests that swept across the globe. In Ireland, up to 40,000 people flooded the streets to halt a possible increase in registration fees for university students. Tens of thousands of student activists in Ukraine, meanwhile, picketed in front of the Ministry of Education to demand, among others, the scrapping of unjust student fees and to make basic student services accessible to all. Widespread mass actions erupted in London, with hundreds of thousands of students marching steadily into the headquarters of the Liberal Democrats to oppose rising tuition rates and the government’s cutting of higher education budgets.

In other places such as Nepal, Indonesia, New Orleans, California, Argentina, Ottawa and New Jersey, students boycotted classes, barricaded classrooms, occupied universities and disrupted classes for weeks, undaunted and unrelenting in their fight for higher state subsidy for education and the scrapping of detrimental and lopsided education policies.

In all these countries, one common slogan was sprayed on buildings and was written on the placards: “Education is not for sale. We are not for sale.” This message, Mr. Speaker, distinguished colleagues, best captures the unified and principled stand of students worldwide against how their governments have been treating education—a private good, a commodity, an adjunct of corporate business.

Indeed, the string of massive student protests that erupted during the past few months were only a logical response to the aggravating education crisis brought about by the disarray in the current global economic order. Economies that once seemed unscathed are now experiencing economic recessions. In order to curb their impending decline, countries intensify their privatization, deregulation and liberalization schemes—the three essential components of the current dominant economic framework notoriously known as neoliberalism.

And neoliberal globalization, Mr. Speaker, distinguished colleagues, is the real culprit behind the problems that our education sector is facing today.

Spending on higher education has been treated as more of a burden than a responsibility the government has to fulfill. As a result, state universities and colleges were forced to fit in the neoliberal framework and generate their own income. To sustain their operations, SUCs either enter into business ventures or increase tuition, thereby transforming education into a commodity.

The student protests that occurred during the past few weeks, thus, were meant not only to put forward the demands of their sector but to call for the dismantling of the prevailing neoliberal policies that neglect the people’s basic rights.

Instead of viewing the ongoing campus strikes as a nuisance, Malacanang should regard it as an act of desperation on the part of our state universities. Because of the reigning neoliberal ideology, state universities are now considered endangered species. And the protests reflect the struggle of our public schools to remain relevant.

Mr. Speaker, dear colleagues, today we commemorate the birth anniversary of Bonifacio, a very important historical figure. Tomorrow, December 1, we could witness the unfolding of another historic moment – that of students, teachers, and school officials linking arms, marching together, speaking as one, reminding the government about its duty to provide decent education to all. My dear colleagues, let us join the education community as they create history.

From David Anthony Hohol…

Something I thought to be true for most of my life was debunked during my time as a student in the hallowed halls of academia.  Now moving into my 11th year of working in the same field,  such conclusions have been clarified as a misnomer several times over. The educated culture of a society is by no means more intelligent than those who never receive a post-secondary education. In fact, some of the most idiotic, hardwood stumps I’ve ever met in my life have M.A.’s and Doctorate degrees, while some of the most intelligent have been farmers or worked on construction sites.

An education can indeed fuel one with the ability to tangibly externalize the internal mechanisms of being human.  By extension, we dissect, analyze, and place within a framework of reference all we experience in order to better know the often unforgiving reflection in our mirrors. Going from the general to the specific, from macro to micro, and back again, an education, at the very least, armed me with the information necessary to better understand my world. With that said, the tools to do so can be acquired by the most foolhardy of people. As my grandfather used to say, “Just because people have a few wrenches and a good socket set, doesn’t mean they knows how to re-build the engine of a car.”

As usual, my grandfather was right. How we use the tools we acquire throughout a lifetime, whether they be acquired through a post-secondary education or the school of hard knocks, is the true mark of intelligence; to master these tools, the mark of wisdom.

The hierarchical structure of the class system also revealed itself to be an integral part of a post-secondary education and then become the ready-made template I stepped into upon becoming professionally employed. Capitalistic principles inherently produce power structures and the Utopian ideal of a classless society thus cannot exist within a cultural construct such as our own. The Postmodern world sits upon a hegemonic hierarchical system, where some must always be subordinate to others. Such a description is an empirically defend-able portrait of society, and academia is no exception. I saw far fewer representatives of the lower class stratosphere, in comparison to those from the middle and upper classes. Pursuing an education appeared to be something simply expected of middle and upper class high school graduates.  Conversely, my fellow proletariat were often the first in their families to attend university. I sometimes ran into fellow working class souls whose parents attended, but I cannot recall even once hearing about anyone’s grandparents being university educated. It seemed I was breaking some trends.

My father was raised on a small family farm and although he flirted with the lower middle class in the early eighties, he has spent the duration of his life amongst the masses of the working class. He loved to pretend otherwise, determined to be more than his father, not knowing his father was more than most men ever could be.

I was raised in this working class atmosphere, in a small town farming community, and education was never a central point of discussion. During my high school years, never once was I approached by my parents about the possibility of attending university. With a father who flunked a grade and barely made his way through high school, and a mother who dropped out after completing only grade ten, it simply wasn’t a part of how they looked at the world. Further still, my parents started charging me rent immediately after I finished high school. The instantaneous pressure to create an income further alienated me from the idea of pursuing any kind of education, and the working class waltz continued. Lower class households do produce university graduates, but they simply are not the statistical norm. Societal expectations, learned behavior, apathy, and financial limitations all combine to reduce the numbers of the working class who enroll in university. Yes, there are those who through hard work make the leap. I am one of them, but the fact of the matter is the percentage of those who have fallen from the middle class far out number those who have raised the social bar.  Further still, the number of those born into middle class families and above who receive an education are gargantuan in comparison to the working class. As I’ve already stated, being educated doesn’t make one better or even more intelligent than someone who isn’t. What it does do however, is create the opportunity to utilize intelligence.

My simple upbringing, along with ten years of post high school blue-collar employment exposed me, almost exclusively, to the proletariat lifestyle.  I never really thought about at the time, but I simply didn’t know many people who’d gone to university. I never really knew people who had money or security, or met anyone who traveled to places like Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. This all changed once I entered university life. During my undergraduate years, more than seventy percent of the students on campus had middle or upper class backgrounds. It was a bit odd for me when I first came to know these people; they were such strange souls. I soon realized just how differently we think, when separated by the almighty tax bracket.

I met people whose parents were doctors, lawyers, financial consultants, CEOs, corporate presidents, vice presidents, judges, psychiatrists, stockbrokers, politicians, scientists, as well as a variety of successful independent entrepreneurs. I heard them talk of how they spent their holidays at beach houses, cottages, and condos, along with a variety of other so-called summer homes. I took classes with nineteen year-old kids who drove sports cars and luxury sedans, and talked of trips to places like England, Italy, Greece, Spain, Japan, and Egypt. They even spoke of investing in retirement plans, the stock market, and building their portfolios. All the while, many sounded as if they somehow needed to justify themselves for having been given so many opportunities. I could always tell those who had the most money. The switch was always turned on, as they forever saw themselves as being seen. I soon saw having money as being an interpretation of style that attempts to validate and rationalize the benefits that come with it. The views many held and the causes they stood behind seemed more obliged than anything. It was almost like they looked through the catalogue of the latest charities or events, and chose what was most fashionable that year. Plastic contrivance was everywhere.

What always gave away the richest, as many did indeed try to hide the fact they came from money, was their skewed perception of finance. Beyond the obvious clue of spending a lot of money around campus, their mentality in terms of annual income was also very telling. I was once assuredly told by a twenty year-old daughter of a man who bought and sold businesses for a living, that she had some poor friends. I immediately suspected her idea of depravity would be just a little different than mine and asked what she thought it meant to be poor. She said it was always a real struggle for her classmate, because her mother was a homemaker and her father only made forty-five thousand dollars a year. I tried to explain that many people would consider that a decent living and further still, many families get by on a hell of a lot less. She looked at me in disbelief and did so honestly. By the way, the last business her father bought and sold was a McDonald’s franchise, and he was currently planning on buying a privatized post office. These naive perspectives can’t be attributed to all those with money I came across, but the majority of those I met indeed filled these uninformed parameters.

My experience with those from the other side galvanized my notions of the class system, revealing to me not just how people live, but how they think when raised with or without money. Now having made the jump, nothing has changed; nothing, that is, except for the fact that in the back of mind I always fear a financial return to where I once was. That and I have big house in the burbs.



From Uganda Corespondent Arinaitwe Rugyendo…

Recently,  I was invited by Makerere University Business School (MUBS) to speak to their completing students.

It is a requirement for MUBS’ mentorship programme to invite business practitioners from town to speak and inspire its business students.

The venue was House 4 where I found about 1000 students waiting and others listening-in from the outside through the windows.

I had been instructed to speak to them about the possibility of starting their own businesses after school and what it takes to create their own jobs.

Using my own experience at Red Pepper, I told them the long story of a newspaper we started with just less than One million shillings some nine years ago but has since grown strong.

The students were eager to listen to one of their own speak because they had been briefed that at the time we founded this newspaper in 2001, I was pretty the same age as most of them. The authorities therefore felt it was important for me to speak about how we did it as a way of inspiring their students who are leaving school in three weeks time with no possibility of immediate employment.

Drawing from both local and international examples, I concluded that the problem of unemployment in Uganda is not because the jobs are not available. It is largely a question of attitude and the failure on the part of our mentors and political leaders to focus the young people’s minds on looking for opportunities and identifying every problem as an opportunity for offering a business solution and therefore a chance at job creation.

I observed that it is for instance a question of attitude realignment if you have many graduate doctors crying for jobs. It should take a deliberate mentorship programme by patriotic political leaders to sensitize them on the fact that as doctors, they are ‘mobile clinics’ whose services patients are waiting to pay for from anywhere. This would be one way of creating their own jobs.

The story of vivid examples from which the students picked business ideas was very long and by close of the session, most of them had been converted to my gospel of entrepreneurship not because they didn’t have the ideas. It was because, like several unemployed young people elsewhere in Uganda, there is nobody to talk to them. There is virtually no one to show them the way which I did!

But the most intriguing part of the session was question time. Students asked a number of questions raging from how to start a business to start-up capital. The frustration on their faces told volumes of how the crisis of unemployment in Uganda has reached almost immeasurable proportions. The young people clearly lack people who should be showing them where opportunities for cheap credit are and which business ideas can make sense.

And no wonder then that current statistics show that for about 390,000 students who finish tertiary education each year, there are only about 8,000 jobs to them to fight for.

During my address, a friend, Mr. Kakembo, who works in the Tax Investigations department at Uganda Revenue Authority, told students of a harrowing experience at the tax body where for every job advertised requiring about four people to fill, there are nearly 2,500 applications to it. The situation has even gotten worse to the extent that across the city, employers are bombarded with job requests from young people requesting to be allowed to ‘just do anything.’ They no longer value their qualifications.

Uganda is certainly sitting on a time bomb because unemployment is no longer an individual case problem. It is a massively public issue because the structure of opportunities has collapsed and the politicians do not seem to have a clue.

Instead, they go on sloganeering, telling the hapless students to go and create jobs. They never tell them anything significant about how to raise start up capital. The cheeky ones blame the degree programmes offered in some universities which they say have little relevance to the employment situation in the country, yet, the very system they serve runs a National Council for Higher Education which is charged with licensing universities and their programmes whose relevance surely cannot be blamed on the graduates.

Apart from the patriotism seminars, civic education programmes and the political education courses at Kyankwanzi and other areas, there are no job creation think tanks in the country and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has never gathered job seekers anywhere in Uganda and showed them where opportunities for investment and start-up capital acquisition are located.

Instead, the unemployed young people are being asked to go, register and vote, which is why I am not surprised that the Electoral Commission has complained of a frustratingly low turn up at the various voter verification centres across the country.

What then can be the possible way forward?

I strongly feel that all political parties competing for power in the next election should, as a first step, focus on removing obstacles to job creation and accessibility.

Reducing the retirement age at the moment is something that would send well accomplished Ugandans into self employment, giving way to a size able number of jobs in the public sector to the young people.

A person who retires at the age 50 now, will utilize his gratuity more responsibly than a young graduate who is given money to start up a shop. In other words, a retiree has more meaningful start-up capital in the form of his hard-earned gratuity than a fresh graduate.

This is where any political party that wants my vote, can instantly create about 50,000 jobs every year as it goes about scratching for more robust solutions.

For many of us, going to college is a right of passage that eventually takes us into the adult world of responsibility, knowledge, money, and  opportunity. It teaches us about both ourselves and the world around us, about the homes we grew up in, and our planetary neighbors. There are also many who manage to do just fine without a college education, but as a whole, statistics plainly reveal the more educated we are,  the more productive we are in society, and thus life as a whole. Perhaps more than anything else, a university campus surrounds  young people with the multiplicity of perspective. In turn, we learn that  our own world view is but one of many and not simply the norm. Below are the top ten reasons to attain a post-secondary education, in no discernible order.

• 1. Become More Knowledgeable in Several Areas
  Although one of the main goals in college is to gain a degree in a particular area, almost every degree will require that you study some core subjects, such as English, math and communication skills. These skills are likely to help you in a future career as you’ll excel beyond candidates who might not have had this broad range of learning opportunities. Some areas will help you in all aspects of life. For example, the ability to speak in front a of a group of people may be something you use in volunteer work for organizations or in groups of friends.

• 2. Learn More About Your Favorite Topic
  One of the biggest reasons to go to college is to learn as much as you possibly can in your chosen subject. In a college setting, you’ll gain access to professors who have advanced degrees in their subject. You’ll find some self-assessment tools on this site, which will help you decide what you should study and if you should study at a traditional university or online. You might also want to read articles like How to Choose a Major in College and get advice from sites like CourseAdvisor.com.

• 3. Build Self Confidence
  One of the biggest boosts from college is an increase in self confidence. Completing even a single class should be a cause for celebration and create a sense of accomplishment in the student. As a college student completes more courses and finds those areas where he or she excels, a sense of self becomes more evident. There are many ways to continue to build confidence, even after graduating from school. There are also online classes one can take to increase self reliance and sense of self.

• 4. Enhance Employment Opportunities
  Those who graduate from college are more likely to land a better paying job, because of specialized training and today’s employment market, which prefers workers with degrees. While there are many points to consider in the debate between higher education or getting a job out of high school, it is always smart to get some specialized training to fall back on. A quick search on sites such as CareerBuilder and Monster.com will help you determine if the potential careers you are seeking require a degree or what the pay difference might be between two and four year degrees.

• 5. Make More Money
  Among the many ways listed to make more money, getting an education shows up on nearly every list. Some careers are obviously higher in demand than others, including anything in health care. Discuss possible career choices with your college advisor, who will have up to date information about job forecasts in a particular field of interest. You may also want to do some research on sites such as Bureau of Labor Statistics, which releases job forecasts.

• 6. Set an Example for Your Children
  Want to encourage your children to go on to higher education and get a college degree? Probably the best way to encourage this is to set the example by taking some college courses yourself. Local community colleges are a nice place to start and often offer a wide variety of courses, including items like photography and writing. You may even want to compare a four year college and a trade school education.

• 7. Learn About Diverse Interests
  Depending upon where you completed most of your elementary and high school education, you may not have had a chance to be around other cultures. College is often a mix of many different people from many different walks of life. This can expand your horizons. Diversity is also a big part of college admissionsthese days. Since you will likely work with many different personalities and ethnicities when you begin your career, college can help prepare you for this.

• 8. Gain Independence
  College allows students to begin to live independently from Mom and Dad, but in a still controlled environment. This can make the transition from home to living on your own much less stressful and more gradual. Participating in various youth activities can help students begin to learn the skills needed to live on their own. The decision of whether to stay home and attend a local city college or go away to school can be a tough one to make.

• 9. Meet Different People and Make New Friends
  It has often been said that the friends you make in college are the friends that you keep for life. Whether this is true or not, college is a great opportunity to make new friends and meet new people. Learn how other people made friends in college. If you’re feeling a little uncertain about this process, you may want to arrange to meet your future roommate before school starts and read up on tips for making new friends, such as the one at FamilyEducation.com about making friends in college.

• 10. Increase Your Network
  College friends and acquaintances can create a valuable network you can utilize for years to come in your career and social life. You may want to keep in mind some networking timetables as you move toward graduation day and get some additional networking tips. You may also want to utilize networking sites like Facebook, Classmates.com, College Tonight, Twitter and even MySpace.com.

*source: lovetoknow.com