(We yield this space to the statement of the National Union of Students of the Philippines due to its timeliness. – Ed.)
THE National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP) condemns the Duterte administration for restoring mandatory Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) this Academic Year 2018-2019 via senior high school.
By requiring all senior high school students to take ROTC for the sake of “promoting discipline and nationalism”, the administration merely wants to produce students who will not be critical and brave enough to question his policies and assert for the democratic rights of the youth and the Filipino people. This railroaded move is part of Duterte’s attempts to pacify the youth sector, which has been active in opposing his anti-people policies and demanding concrete steps to address poverty, landlessness, contractualization, and access to education. The regime seeks to produce blind followers who will pledge allegiance to his dictatorship and tyrannical rule over the country.
This administration is deceptively bringing back mandatory ROTC under different names, such as Advanced Citizenship Program in Cordillera or Service Training Program for Grade 12 students of PUP; yet the Duterte government cannot erase the bloody history of this program. Since its inception, ROTC has propagated in schools the violent, mercenary culture that is inherent in the armed forces of the reactionary state. It is also a mechanism to plant student intelligence networks in campuses for monitoring and surveillance of activities of the student body, especially progressive youth organizations. Moreover, ROTC legitimizes campus military presence by allowing the fascist state forces to freely enter school premises.
Worse, the restoration of mandatory ROTC is a reversal of the victory of the youth movement in making ROTC an optional program. In 2001, thousands of students united for the campaign to abolish the program after the unfortunate death of UST ROTC member Mark Welson Chua, who was found dead after exposing the corruption inside the ROTC program.
NUSP calls on all student councils and formations to resist the reinstatement of mandatory ROTC. In these times of heightening repression of students and the people, we must collectively oppose schemes that aggravate the fascist nature of our educational system, and struggle towards a nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented education.
