Reveille
The PMA ‘mystique’
By Ramon FarolanLast SaturdaY, the Philippine Military Academy held its annual general membership meeting at Camp Aguinaldo with Interior Secretary Mar Roxas as guest of honor.
Last SaturdaY, the Philippine Military Academy held its annual general membership meeting at Camp Aguinaldo with Interior Secretary Mar Roxas as guest of honor.
The philosopher Pascal said, “If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.” It appears that nowadays Pascal’s road is becoming the course of many a policymaker.
I approached the school—high in the hills of northern Luzon—with a bit of trepidation. It was late in the day, and schools that lack the joyous cacophony of children playing always seem a little eerie to me.
With so many stories about bullying surfacing lately, now we hear even the gorgeous model Tyra Banks admit that she was also bullied when she was a skinny 11-year-old. On the local level, we recently heard of the adult who pointed a gun at the head of a high school student inside a campus in an exclusive subdivision in Makati.
How should a student respond when he or she becomes the object of bullying?
It began on a rather freakish note. From out of the blue, The Varsitarian, UST’s school organ, came out swinging at Ateneo and La Salle, calling them “cowards and lemons,” and their faculty a bunch of “intellectual pretenders and interlopers.”
If I were a young parent today with the choice of where to send my child for basic education, which school would I choose? There is no simple answer. One’s choice of school would depend, first of all, on the kind of education one thinks his child needs. In turn, this would depend on the kind of prospects in life a parent wishes the child to have in the future.
Some valuable truths underlie Oplan Bayanihan, the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ 16-month-old internal peace and security plan. Chief among them are that the various insurgent groups in the Philippines are unlikely to be beaten by force alone, that better standards of living can curb the roots of the rebellions, and that the military could [...]
It’s less about whether to be libertines or prudes, or how lenient and how severe. That will merely drag us into the amorphous debate on obscenity, and lead us to say, “I know it when I see it,” in the famous words of US Justice Potter Stewart. Rather, it’s about who gets to make the [...]
Human Rights Watch, an internationally respected NGO based in New York and with a Manila field office, has reported that in the Cordilleras, the Philippine military has used school campuses as camps for their soldiers. From what I’ve read, the military presence seems largely benign, the soldiers generally well-behaved and even performing community work. That [...]
Former Education Undersecretary Isagani Cruz once told me that the Revised Basic Education Curriculum or RBEC that guides Philippine public schools today is an outline that, to be truly effective, needs to be constantly fleshed out in the classroom by the teacher. Previously, I referred to the TIMSS analysis that found that “coherence, focus and [...]
Tertiary education responds to three distinct national goals. First, it aims to educate the youth to become active and productive members of society. Second, it seeks to meet and match industry demand with a competent and globally competitive workforce. Finally, through a continuing effort to reach global education standards, our universities aim to increase the quality of human capital and productivity vis-à-vis national and economic progress.
