By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
An article in Rappler about political dynasties is scary. 80% of governors. 2/3 of those in Congress, and about 1/3 of those occupying local elective posts are from political dynasties.
In short, the main cause of poverty in this country which is the inequitable distribution of wealth has worsened. And yet our people voted for BBM, who is from perhaps the strongest political dynasty in this country.
And when you ask majority of those who voted for him why, their answer is, “Basta!”
Sadder than this is, many of those who voted so have college degrees or are professionals. By the standard definition of education, they are therefor educated.
If we look at our educational system, students are not made to think critically. They just memorized from some standard text books and they regurgitated these curing exams. Aside from these are what the teachers lectured. If you could throw these back to the teacher come the periodic tests, you might end up being an honor student.
The few schools whose main style of instruction is to develop critical thinking are branded as breeding grounds for activists who are later called terrorists. With such kind of education, the answer “basta” is good enough.
Just the other day, a college graduating student emailed to us her article for publication as that is the requirement for her to graduate. She has to have one article published in a local newspaper. When I saw her piece, it was hopeless. I could not make heads nor tails of what she was trying to say. She did not even know the application of simple tenses.
Any hope for the article was buried by her propensity to use big or uncommon words which she did erroneously.
To top it all, her sentence were so long that any clarity was lost on her convoluted usage of words.
It was a number of years ago when I stopped accepting interns from masscom courses who were graduating. It was so difficult to straighten out their pieces to make them publishable. So I surrendered. No more interns. They used to come from Baguio schools and elsewhere around Northern Luzon.
I thought our colleges and universities have become better over the years. Apparently, they did the opposite. While the money being paid by parents of students was good, the supposed education being imparted to them was not good enough. This is the norm. Of course, there are some exceptions.
So I realized the reason why we vote the way we do during elections.
But there must be a silver lining to all these. I remember what a college friend once told me long ago. He had the wish for our hardships as a nation to become even worse. I told him that is weird and crazy.
Now I realized he must have had a point. He said, that if we Filipinos suffered even more economically, which would eventually result in our suffering in every respect, we Filipinos might wake up from our stupidity and might become wiser in casting our votes in the future.
Do we really have to go that far to realize that we should think and act better?**
