All hands on deck

By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas

It is our press day now, or two days before Monday, election day.
In all candidates’ camps, all hands have to be on deck. If you cannot be on deck, you should be on call from today all the way until the counting is over. For those whose candidates have a shot at winning, their people would be alert and wide-eyed stealing only a few minutes of sleep every now and then on their desks or office tables, until the proclamation of their candidate is done.
For us who are not involved with the campaign of any candidate, we can sleep soundly. Satisfying our curiosity on who is winning can be done thru our cellphones, radios or TVs.
It might be painful if the candidates we were rooting for did not win. But actually the candidates who will win are the ones we deserve. As they say, nothing is an accident. Everything is an incident. There must be a cosmic reason for it. How can we question God’s plan?
For me, I can find consolation in what a friend once told me. He did not mind if the country would face untold hardships as there would still be a positive side to it. That we Filipinos would become wiser or our brains would evolve so we will not be voting for corrupt politicians, especially those who had been robbing us blind.
That can be a consolation but for us to become wiser seems to be an impossibility. Being robbed and abused by our leaders with us not becoming any wiser was and is our history for more than 300 years. It will not happen in the foreseeable future.
For those who understand that the stupidity of our voters is the main cause of our hardships, the only remedy for that is better education for our people. Are we moving towards that end? No. We are going towards the opposite direction. Our very own columnist Estanislao Albano had been chronicling how our educational system had been deteriorating to the extent that many elementary graduates are non-readers.
I was in a wedding this weekend and my seatmate who is a high school teacher in a town beside Baguio told me a very sad story. He has a student who could not even read a sentence all by himself. That is in a town near a city. What more in the hinterlands.
If voters are lowly educated, how can we expect them to vote wisely?
A taxi driver whom I took to go to court in La Trinidad which, like Baguio City, has no sufficient parking spaces, revealed that he would vote for Leni Robredo because one of her main programs is the proper education of our people. As he put it, he understands that education is the great equalizer in favor of those who are less privileged.
For democracy to work, more than 50% of voters should be well-educated. How can that be achieved if high school students are non-readers?
Another requirement for democracy to be sustained is, more and more people should be properly educated. That means constant improvement of our educational system. Are we doing that? No. Constant deterioration perhaps.
And then there is the lack of educational qualifications for candidates. As long as you have the age, citizenship and residency requirements, and able to read and write, you can run for elective office. It would not matter even if you did not understand what you were reading.
So is this country hopeless? I don’t think so. More and more people are clamoring for reformation in our educational system. Sooner or later, some reforms will be implemented, especially if our next president would really make education her priority.
But what if he is one who does not even have a BACHELOR’S DEGREE? That would be a gargantuan problem.**