I have participated in many commencement exercises, and presided over a number of them. None was more memorable or more moving than the graduation I attended three weeks ago at the Apu Palumgawan Cultural Education Center (APC) in Bendum, Bukidnon.
This Latin interrogative sentence became memorable as the title of a Hollywood film that won multiple Oscar awards, including one for Peter Ustinov playing the role of the Roman Emperor Nero. The spectacle and the love story perhaps distract from the context and the import of the question.
The latest Sabah incident recalls again how the countries of Southeast Asia took shape from the territorial fragments cut up by foreign colonial powers. The task of ensuring the fit of the jigsaw pieces they inherited still occupies national governments.
The message is hardly new: Prosperity, perhaps survival, in the 21st-century business environment requires enterprises to expand beyond national boundaries. What is surprising is that Japan should feel the need to preach a message whose practice it had pioneered and in which it had excelled.
One senator’s issue has become an institutional concern. Two weeks ago, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano said that the Senate ethics committee he chairs was formulating the rules for hearing some six plagiarism cases on its agenda, including one against his sister, Sen. Pia Cayetano. There has been no additional update.
TAKING OFF from the Unesco advocacy on Education for All (EFA), the World Movement for Democracy chose Democracy for All: Ensuring Political, Social and Economic Inclusion as the theme for its seventh biennial assembly, convened last month in Lima, Peru. For both education and democracy, inclusion is the urgent agenda, and EFA must serve as the foundation for worldwide democracy.
The University of the Philippines, De La Salle, Ateneo de Manila and Asian Institute of Management joined 72 other higher education institutions from 37 countries at the 3rd Asem (Asia-Europe Meetings) Rectors’ Conference convened last week at Groningen University in the Netherlands. Most of the participants came from government institutions; in both Europe and Asia, the state has historically assumed responsibility for education at all levels.
Nothing like the sudden, dramatic death of a righteous man to provoke pangs of guilt among those who refused to render him his due. Some members of the Commission on Appointments and their constituents are now turning cartwheels to convince the public that they supported, all along, the confirmation of Jesse Robredo as interior and local government secretary. I do not believe Jesse was unduly bothered by the delay in his confirmation, nor would he be impressed by its posthumous award.
Seven years ago, the government of Burma (Myanmar) started to move the main offices of the civil and military bureaucracy from Yangon north to Nay Pyi Taw. Travelers can take a morning return flight from Yangon. During the rainy season, when flight schedules become unpredictable, the safer recourse is the road.
Manila’s selection as the venue of the 45th annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank gave tourism a boost. Half of some 4,300 registered delegates came from overseas. But beyond the body count, the ADB event focused the attention of decision-makers from business, government, and official development agencies on the Philippines.
Public elementary schools would have closed down their classrooms by this time and released for the summer break the roughly 13.2 million pupils who had enrolled for the 2011-2012 school year. About 1.86 million of these pupils obtained their elementary school diplomas. Perhaps, 1.25 million, or about two-thirds of this cohort, will proceed to high school in June. Following the Department of Education’s plan, these pupils will be the first to have the opportunity to complete the K-12 Basic Education System.
