“The presumptive vice president is a good fit.”
The first act of our presumptive president, Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. in appointing presumptive vice president Sara Duterte as secretary of the Department of Education is most appropriate and timely. The problem is not so much that its lack of funds to sustain its functions but that the Department of Education was used by the previous administration as a principal vehicle to rewrite our history and used it to exact vengeance, perpetuate injustice, extreme social and economic inequality, and malign our people of their heroism.
Today, the department suffers not from lack of funds but for a misguided sense of what it aims to accomplish. In fact, the department continues to enjoy the biggest chunk in government allocation, second only to the Department of the Defense. Rather, the department continues to suffer from what we call problem of budget misallocation, in rewriting our history at the expense of people we should rightly honor, and in doing the function of shaping our foreign policy, and by the continued domination and control of people who should uphold the constitutional separation of the Church and the State.
Sara Duterte Carpio exactly fits the position entrusted her. It is not that she knows the nitty-gritty of the department, but that she has the political will not to succumb to the persuasive pressure of people committed to mold the thinking of our younger generation, and mitigate the slanderous attacks on the institutions that provide them with their inalienable right to education. Second, for Sara to take the most arduous task of cleansing the Department of Education and Culture of subversive who wrongly takes their right to academic freedom to discredit and destroy the institution that opens to them the door for a brighter future.
There is that great task in the assignment that awaits her. There is deep trust in her capability to carry on her assignment without incurring the ire of the people. From what I heard, although Sara is a devout Catholic, which some say was influenced by her mother, she is far from being a bigot and hypocritical but a strict observer of secularism, a path in our philosophical that should have been observed since the ascendancy of the discredited self-righteous government.
Her role is to principally cleanse our educational system from the fitters of an alien ideology, from people who espouse hatred, advocate violence, divisiveness, nihilism, and even terrorism, on the belief that they can do no wrong in the name of religion. State university has become the hotbed to promote terrorism, anarchism, and misplaced communism all in the name of academic freedom. Presumptive vice president Sara Duterte possesses the audacity to enforce what is judicious, and many are wrong to assume that the contest to win the hearts and minds of our people is in the countryside. The contest begins right inside the classrooms lorded over by communist cadres and obscurantist clerics in cahoots with agents of that bankrupt and dying empire.
Duterte-Carpio should be honored by her appointment to that position. She is not only tasked to rebuild our nation but to rectify the serious errors to distort our history. Her task is to ensure that the second Philippine revolution will finally bloom.
Historically, the position of secretary of education has always been reserved to clergy or to anybody who represents the interest of the Church.
During the time of Corazon Aquino, who snatched our democracy people call “political swindle,” the position was completely set aside to give way to religious laities who run and operate elitist colleges and universities. They lorded it over by exempting all forms of taxes, including gifts and donations form NGOs.
If the position of secretary of defense, finance and governor of the Bangko Sentral is chosen on the basis of whether the person is acceptable to the US.
A gargantuan task awaits the secretary of education. Her duty today is not only to rewrite our history but most importantly to cleanse the misconceptions spoon feed to our people that virtually tells us who we are; that we are corrupt and will do no good for our country. The even tried to dictate whom to honor as our heroes, and always they represent the compromising view. People appointed by the previous administration zeroed in by revising our history thinking not only of our past but also our values as freedom loving people, our patriotism and independence.
To make sure our people read and interpret their version of history as injected into their minds, they wasted no time rewriting our history such that they committed errors in both facts and grammar that many of our teachers and professors on the subject are confused about.
But the greatest error they committed is to allude that the former president was responsible for the assassination of former senator Begnino
Aquino Aquino. It was during the era of the yellow regime that they consummately “politicized” our history to suit their agenda of perpetuating themselves in power. The irony about this tragedy is that those who write our history almost instantly attribute the killing of Aquino to the former president when they none even inferentially pointed the blame on him.
They did not even bother to summon the person who wanted to shed light about his personal knowledge of the assassination for fear it would expose personalities who in fact were suspected as responsible.
The secretary of education will be doing a job alien to her post – that of redirecting our foreign policy as originally conceived by Ferdinand Marcos.
This now has become the job of the secretary of education. The opposition at the outset tried to dismantle that political bridge erected by the former president. It was supposed to be the start of the second revolution which many believed was nipped in the bud by the decision of the Americans to colonized us instead of grant us our independence. Fortunately, the election of President Duterte caught them by surprise. His views continue to reflect our longing for glory, and his anti-clericalism haunts the communists because of their close collaboration with them.
To refresh the minds of our people, it was Marcos who established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. What Duterte did was to simply reaffirm that friendship established by Marcos. Marcos in fact lit the wick for his ouster by the Americans who from then on considered his policy a danger to their security structure for Asia and the Pacific.
Before that, there were already signs that the policy of the former president was veering to depart from his predecessors as when he sought to reduce the number of US military bases, the hectarage they use, and most grueling the rental for their use which was an extended for a period of 25 years to expire by 1991.
Marcos also incurred the ire of the “sugar barons” who depended their wealth to bribe corrupt politicians and the feudalistic clerics to perpetuate social inequality by his decision to allow the US-Philippine parity rights agreement to expire on 1974; opened the windows by establishing diplomatic relations with the then Soviet Union and other neutral countries culminating in the country’s joining of the Group of 77 held in Kenya.
These are but a few of the tasks that essentially belong to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Since the previous regime took much effort to distort and revise our history, this now becomes the task of the Department of Education to rectify the systematic and serious distortion of our past.