Check your privilege

Imay be eating three meals a day and can chomp on Cheetos in between but my classmate can barely buy lunch. I may have a decent hand-me-down bag to school; my classmate makes use of a worn out bag from his father who works in construction. I may be able to buy a book for my Humanities subject within the day it was required; my classmate asks to sit beside me to read the chapter on Renaissance art.

College was like this. I did not come from a welloff family, but there were students who was in a worse situation than I was in.

I say this with pride: I was a working student with few odd jobs on the side to help me pay miscellaneous fees—sometimes tuition fees included if I was lucky in a recent gig. It was a literal circus to describe; aside from the difficult grades to maintain, the stress of where to get enough money to pay for the midterms was an absolute struggle.

What I knew about my situation back then, there were students who would queue up in the line for days to obtain temporary passes to exams from college deans in exchange for their promissory notes. I remember a classmate, Ricky (not his real name), who would hide this letter, dodge questions from nosy classmates and, when he was about to take the exam, he would discreetly pass it to the professor without saying any word.

Nobody likes a promissory notes. It represents a multitude of problematic backgrounds if you walk around with it, especially in a State University with its diverse mix of the rich and the poor.

Recently, the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act was ratified by both Houses of Congress. It is now waiting for President Rodrigo Duterte’s approval into law and is expected to be signed this month. Students in public colleges and universities, and technical vocational schools will then be able to enjoy the benefits of this law by the second semester of school year 2017–2018.

This is a major step the government is finally taking in addressing poverty in the nation. Illiteracy is poverty. No access to education is amplifying poverty. It is a problem we have been trying to eradicate for years, but not one administration in the past has been successful as no one has tried to carefully look into its resolution.

Virgil (not his real name), a colleague of mine, is looking forward to this law. He is sending his kid to college next year in a prestigious school in Cebu – a plan of which he calls before vague. With his meager salary, sending his kid to a university is nothing but a dream, but that dream now will become a reality.

After a year of circus-like stage plays we have witnessed, the current administration has finally come into its senses—at least for once. A bigger budget will be allocated to the valuable investment. As what Napoleon Bonaparte would say, “Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you the birth of a civilized, educated nation.”