I AM no fan of the Reserved Officers Training Corps (ROTC) even if I had fun with the Citizens Army Training (CAT) of old under our former commandant Robert “Bobby Knight” Inoferio in Southwestern University (SWU). At least in the CAT, a certain level of high school innocence is retained. The ROTC is the big man’s game, literally. So too the corruption that at times were committed there.
When I went to school, obviously that was eons ago, CAT was mandatory in high school and ROTC was mandatory in college. We already know why ROTC was eventually discontinued in schools nationwide. That was after Mark Chua, an ROTC cadet of the University of Sto. Tomas, was killed after exposing the corruption that was rampant in the school’s ROTC unit.
The late senator Renato Cayetano, father of the former Foreign Affairs secretary Alan Peter Cayetano, filed the bill in the Senate that abolished mandatory military training. The stress there is on the word “mandatory” because one can still take ROTC in college under the National Service Training Program (NSTP).
Under the NSTP, male and female college students in public or private educational institutions are obliged to undergo one of the three NSTP components for two semesters. The three components a college student can choose from are civic welfare training, literacy training and military education and training (for the male).
“Finally, college students are now given a choice on how to participate in nation-building through civic consciousness aside from the ROTC which was imposed 76 years ago,” Cayetano said when the measure was finally signed into law.
I think the current setup is the more democratic one because the college student is given a choice and not forced. Those who love military training can choose the ROTC. So the ROTC has not been abolished, it is still technically there although only a smaller number of male students have given it preference.
This is probably the reason for the call for the revival of mandatory ROTC. Because given a choice, students would prefer civic welfare or literacy training over military training. And I say civic welfare and literacy training are not lesser components than the military one.
Frankly, I don’t want my two sons to undergo ROTC training if it is not an improvement from the one in our time. While those pushing for mandatory ROTC talk about the discipline and love of country that ROTC supposedly develops in the youth, they conveniently refused to talk about the corruption and the abusive tendencies that the training breeds.
The rich kids and those with friends in the military can pass the ROTC without undergoing training by simply paying off the officers or having their military relatives influence the grading system. And officers almost always acquire the abusive ways and the swagger of the commandant and other training officers who are mostly from the military. That was the mindset that killed Mark Chua.
So why disturb the current setup? If we want more students to choose ROTC in the NSTP, why not just launch campaigns that would make more students love military training and enroll in the ROTC?