Fetalvero: A formula for success

THE K-12 curriculum aims to change our educational system and with the intention to make our citizens productive adults through gainful employment later. Does this guarantee stable jobs for the citizens of this country? Will it lessen the number of overseas Filipino workers (OFW)?

Security of tenure is what we need. While companies practice contractual employment, Filipinos will continue to live in a shoe-string budget. Cheap labor and lax environmental laws attract corporations to do business here. We have installed politicians who would want to “keep the status quo,” so to speak.

Education is important but it should be a stepping stone for social change. Activists take to the streets at every opportunity they have. They display placards demanding change. They have done these for decades but it has lost its influence. What it has done so far is to get the ire of motorists because of the traffic they cause, not to mention the taxpayers’ money being spent every time the police force is mobilized to control demonstrations and rallies that could become violent.

An outreach phase education is being introduced in the "Global Activists Manual." The movement believes that a new trade agreement could only be made “unless they respect workers’ rights and the environment.” Organizations now in place—like the International Labor Organizations and the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights—are somewhat unable to stop sweatshops, underemployment and double payrolls.

Author Steve Schnapp wrote about popular education, saying: “Popular education is carried out within a political vision that sees women and men at the community and grassroots level as the primary agents for change. It is a deeply democratic process equipping communities to name and create their own vision of the alternatives for which they struggle.”

It is therefore an organized movement that attends stockholders’ meetings, getting us much information as to where people can be united for a fair economy—an economy that will fill the two empty bottles of the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant.