Roperos: Kids talk peace

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

THE Department of Education the other day revealed its plan to consult the nation’s young inhabitants what they think about our need for peace in the face of many “armed conflicts affecting many schools in the country.” It appears that high DepEd officials want “to bring the children’s voice to the warring parties’ negotiating table.”

And so, the education agency is urging the children’s elders to “listen” to the kids’ views on peace. Towards this goal, the Yes For Peace: Bayanihan Sa Kapayapaan staged a campaign that “aims to gather survey responses from 10 million Filipinos on their desire to end armed conflict, and restore peace and order in the country.”

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The campaign’s population target is the peace-loving Filipinos, “10 years old and older, to speak as one to provide a democratic people’s mandate for the comprehensive peace process…”

I think that DepEd officials are on the right track in latching on to the idea to use our schools to inculcate on our young kids the imperative need for peace and order in our country. I think that had there been real peace and order in the country, we would have been better off today.

Our teachers, particularly those of the starting age of the kids’ education when the minds are genuinely young, innocent and impressionable, may not have given their pupils deep and serious emphasis on the need and importance of having and maintaining peace and order in the home, in the neighborhood, and in the school.

DepEd intends to send the results of the survey, which the agency would undertake, to the Office of the President “during the celebration of the 26th anniversary of the Edsa People Power Revolution.”

DepEd officials believe that since the targeted basic respondents of the survey would be Grade 4 pupils, they would have enough knowledge about what’s going on around them, and at age 10, it is important that they begin to get involved.

Actually, one of the long-drawn out critical complaint about our people’s attitude towards our social condition is the general public indifference, the sense of apathy of our people regarding the prevailing socio-political condition of the country.

As a consequence, any breakdown in the peace and order situation in any part of the country becomes very difficult to contain. Thus, the current DepEd move should prove truly sound.

Getting our young to develop a deep and serious sense of involvement in the affairs of their home and their community would inculcate early in them a feeling of social responsibility and deep mutual concern for the plight of every Filipino.